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TIME AND CHANGE 



TIME AND CHANGE 



BY 



JOHN BURROUGHS 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

&be fiifcertfi&e $re££ CambriD^e 

1912 



V AS 



•A* 



COPYRIGHT, I912, BY JOHN BURROUGHS 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published October iqi2 



gClA327489 



PREFACE 

I SUSPECT that in this volume my reader will 
feel that I have given him a stone when he asked 
for bread, and his feeling in this respect will need no 
apology. I fear there is more of the matter of hard 
science and of scientific speculation in this collec- 
tion than of spiritual and aesthetic nutriment; but 
I do hope the volume is not entirely destitute of the 
latter. If I have not in some degree succeeded in 
transmuting my rocks into a kind of wholesome 
literary bread, or, to vary the figure, in turning them 
into a soil in which some green thing or flower of 
human interest and emotion may take root and 
grow, then, indeed, have I come short of the end 
I had in view. 

I am well aware that my own interest in geology 
far outruns my knowledge, but if I can in some de- 
gree kindle that interest in my reader, I shall be 
putting him on the road to a fuller knowledge than 
I possess. As with other phases of nature, I have 
probably loved the rocks more than I have studied 
them. In my youth I delighted in lingering about 
and beneath the ledges of my native hills, partly in 
the spirit of adventure and a boy's love of the wild, 
and partly with an eye to their curious forms, and 

v 



PREFACE 

the evidences of immense time that looked out from 
their gray and crumbling fronts. I was in the pre- 
sence of Geologic Time, and was impressed by the 
scarred and lichen-coated veteran without knowing 
who or what he was. But he put a spell upon me 
that has deepened as the years have passed, and 
now my boyhood ledges are more interesting to me 
than ever. 

If one gains an interest in the history of the earth, 
he is quite sure to gain an interest in the history of 
the life on the earth. If the former illustrates the 
theory of development, so must the latter. The 
geologist is pretty sure to be an evolutionist. As 
science turns over the leaves of the great rocky 
volume, it sees the imprint of animals and plants 
upon them and it traces their changes and the ap- 
pearance of new species from age to age. The bio- 
logic tree has grown and developed as the geologic 
soil in which it is rooted has deepened and ripened. 
I am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or 
by the quality and complexion of my mind, before 
I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in 
the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the ani- 
mal origin of man, has not for me been an easy 
matter. 

The essays on the subject in this volume are 
the outcome of the stages of brooding and think- 
ing which I have gone through in accepting this 
doctrine. I am aware that there is much repeti- 

vi 



PREFACE 

tion in them, but maybe on that very account 
they will help my reader to go along with me 
over the long road we have to travel to reach this 
conclusion. 

July, 1912. 



CONTENTS 

I. The Long Road 1 

II. The Divine Abyss 39 

HI. The Spell of the Yosemite ... 71 

IV. Through the Eyes of the Geologist . 85 

V. Holidays in Hawaii 119 

VI. The Old Ice Flood 157 

VII. The Friendly Soil 167 

Vni. Primal Energies 171 

IX. Scientific Faith ....... 175 

X. "The Worm striving to be Man" . . 187 

XI. The Phantoms behind us .... 197 

XH. The Hazards of the Past .... 225 

XIII. The Gospel of Nature 243 



TIME AND CHANGE 

I 

THE LONG ROAD 



THE long road I have in mind is the long road of 
evolution, — the road you and I have traveled 
in the guise of humbler organisms, from the first uni- 
cellular life in the old Cambrian seas to the complex 
and highly specialized creature that rules supreme in 
the animal kingdom to-day. Surely a long journey, 
stretching through immeasurable epochs of geologic 
time, and attended by vicissitudes of which we can 
form but feeble conceptions. 

The majority of readers, I fancy, are not yet ready 
to admit that they, or any of their forebears, have 
ever made such a journey. We have all long been 
taught that our race was started upon its career only 
a few thousand years ago, started, not amid the war- 
rings of savage elemental nature, but in a pleasant 
garden with everything needed close at hand. This 
belief has faded a good deal in our time, especially 
among thoughtful persons; but in a modified form, 
as the special creation theory, it held sway in the 
minds of the older naturalists like Agassiz and Daw- 

1 



TIME AND CHANGE 

son, long after Darwin had launched his revolution- 
ary doctrine of our animal origin, putting man in the 
same zoological scheme as the lower orders. 

We are slow to adjust our minds to the revelations 
of science, they have been so long adjusted to a revel- 
ation, so-called, of an entirely different character. 
It gives them a wrench more or less violent when we 
try to make them at home and at their ease amid 
these new and startling disclosures. To many good 
people evolution seems an ungodly doctrine, like 
setting up a remorseless logic in the place of an om- 
nipresent Creator. But there is no help for it. Sci- 
ence has fairly turned us out of our comfortable little 
anthropomorphic notion of things into the great 
out-of-doors of the universe. We must and will get 
used to the chill, yea, to the cosmic chill, if need be. 
Our religious instincts will be all the hardier for it. 

When we accepted Newton's discovery of the 
force called gravitation, we virtually surrendered 
ourselves to the enemy, and started upon a road, 
the road of natural causation, that traverses the 
whole system of created things. We cannot turn 
back; we may lie down by the roadside and dream 
our old dreams, but our children and their children 
will press on, and will be exhilarated by the journey. 

It is at first sight an unpalatable truth that evo- 
lution confronts us with, and it requires courage 
calmly to face it. But it is in perfect keeping with 
the whole career of physical science, which is forever 



THE LONG ROAD 

directing our attention to common near-at-hand 
facts for the key to remote and mysterious occur- 
rences. 

It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the 
wonder of life, because it takes it out of the realm of 
the arbitrary, the exceptional, and links it to the se- 
quence of natural causation. That man should have 
been brought into existence by the fiat of an omni- 
potent power is less an occasion for wonder than 
that he should have worked his way up from the 
lower non-human forms. That the manward im- 
pulse should never have been lost in all the appalling 
vicissitudes of geologic time, that it should have 
pushed steadily on, through mollusk and fish and am- 
phibian and reptile, through swimming and creeping 
and climbing things, and that the forms that con- 
veyed it should have escaped the devouring mon- 
sters of the earth, sea, and air till it came to its full 
estate in a human being, is the wonder of wonders. 

In like manner, evolution raises immensely the 
value of the biological processes that are every- 
where operative about us, by showing us that these 
processes are the channels through which the crea- 
tive energy has worked, and is still working. Not in 
the far-off or in the exceptional does it seek the key 
to man's origin, but in the sleepless activity of the 
creative force, which has been pushing onward and 
upward, from the remotest time, till it has come to 
full fruition in man. 

3 



TIME AND CHANGE 

„ It is easy to inject into man's natural history a 
supernatural element, as nearly all biologists and 
anthropologists before Darwin's time did, and as 
many serious people still do. It is too easy, in fact, 
and the temptation to do so is great. It makes short 
work of the problem of man's origin, and saves a 
deal of trouble. But this method is more and more 
discredited, and the younger biologists and natural 
philosophers accept the zoological conception of 
man, which links him with all the lower forms, and 
proceed to work from that. 

When we have taken the first step in trying to 
solve the problem of man's origin, where can we 
stop ? Can we find any point in his history where we 
can say, Here his natural history ends, and his su- 
pernatural history begins ? Does his natural history 
end with the pre-glacial man, with the cave man, or 
the river-drift man, with the low-browed, long-jawed 
fossil man of Java, — Pithecanthropus erectus, de- 
scribed by Du Bois ? Where shall we stop on his 
trail ? I had almost said "step on his tail," for we 
undoubtedly, if we go back far enough, come to a 
time when man had a tail. Every unborn child at a 
certain stage of its development still has a tail, as it 
also has a coat of hair and a hand-like foot. But 
could we stop with the tailed man — the manlike 
ape, or the apelike man ? Did his Creator start him 
with this appendage, or was it a later suffix of his 
own invention ? 

4 



THE LONG ROAD 

If we once seriously undertake to solve the riddle 
of man's origin, and go back along the line of his de- 
scent, I doubt if we can find the point, or the form, 
where the natural is supplanted by the supernatural 
as it is called, where causation ends and miracle be- 
gins. Even the first dawn of protozoic life in the pri- 
mordial seas must have been natural, or it would not 
have occurred, — must have been potential in what 
went before it. In this universe, so far as we know 
it, one thing springs from another; the sequence of 
cause and effect is continuous and inviolable. 

We know that no man is born of full stature, 
with his hat and boots on; we know that he grows 
from an infant, and we know the infant grows from 
a foetus, and that the foetus grows from a bit of 
nucleated protoplasm in the mother's womb. Why 
may not the race of man grow from a like simple 
beginning? It seems to be the order of nature; it is 
the order of nature, — first the germ, the inception, 
then the slow growth from the simple to the com- 
plex. It is the order of our own thoughts, our own 
arts, our own civilization, our own language. 

In our candid moments we acknowledge the ani- 
mal in ourselves and in our neighbors, — especially 
in our neighbors, — the beast, the shark, the hog, 
the sloth, the fox, the monkey; but to accept the 
notion of our animal origin, that gives us pause. To 
believe that our remote ancestor, no matter how 
remote in time or space, was a lowly organized crea- 

5 



TIME AND CHANGE 

ture living in the primordial seas with no more 
brains than a shovel-nosed shark or a gar-pike, puts 
our scientific faith to severe test. 

Think of it. For countless ages, millions upon 
millions of years, we see the earth swarming with 
life, low bestial life, devouring and devoured, myri- 
ads of forms, all in bondage to nature or natural 
forces, living only to eat and to breed, localized, 
dependent upon place and clime, shaped to specific 
ends like machines, — to fly, to swim, to climb, to 
run, to dig, to drill, to weave, to wade, to graze, to 
crush, — knowing not what they do, as void of con- 
scious purpose as the thorns, the stings, the hooks, 
the coils, and the wings in the vegetable world, mak- 
ing no impression upon the face of nature, as much 
a part of it as the trees and the stones, species after 
species having its day, and then passing off the 
stage, when suddenly, in the day before yesterday in 
the geologic year, so suddenly as to give some color 
of truth to the special creation theory, a new and 
strange animal appears, with new and strange pow- 
ers, separated from the others by what appears an 
impassable gulf, less specialized in his bodily powers 
than the others, but vastly more specialized in his 
brain and mental powers, instituting a new order of 
things upon the earth, the face of which he in time 
changes through his new gift of reason, inventing 
tools and weapons and language, harnessing the 
physical forces to his own ends, and putting all 

6 



THE LONG ROAD 

things under his feet, — man the wonder-worker, 
the beholder of the stars, the critic and spectator of 
creation itself, the thinker of the thoughts of God, 
the worshiper, the devotee, the hero, spreading 
rapidly over the earth, and developing with pro- 
digious strides when once fairly launched upon his 
career. Can it be possible, we ask, that this god was 
fathered by the low bestial orders below him, — in- 
stinct giving birth to reason, animal ferocity devel- 
oping into human benevolence, the slums of nature 
sending forth the ruler of the earth. It is a hard 
proposition, I say, undoubtedly the hardest that 
science has ever confronted us with. 

Haeckel, discussing this subject, suggests that it is 
the parvenu in us that is reluctant to own our lowly 
progenitors, the pride of family and position, like 
that of would-be aristocratic sons who conceal the 
humble origin of their parents. But it is more than 
that; it is the old difficulty of walking by faith where 
there is nothing visible to walk upon: we lack faith 
in the efficiency of the biologic laws, or any mun- 
dane forces, to bridge the tremendous chasm that 
separates man from even the highest of the lower 
orders. His radical unlikeness to all the forms below 
him, as if he moved in a world apart, into which 
they could never enter, as in a sense he does, is 
where the difficulty lies. Moreover, evolution balks 
us because of the inconceivable stretch of time dur- 
ing which it has been at work. It is as impossible for 

7 



TIME AND CHANGE 

us to grasp geological time as sidereal space. All the 
standards of measurement furnished us by experi- 
ence are as inadequate as is a child's cup to measure 
the ocean. 

Several million years, or one million years, — how 
can we take it in? We cannot. A hundred years is a 
long time in human history, and how we pause be- 
fore a thousand! Then think of ten thousand, of 
fifty thousand, of one hundred thousand, of ten 
hundred thousand, or one million, or of one hundred 
million! What might not the slow but ceaseless 
creative energy do in that time, changing but a hair 
in each generation! If our millionaires had to earn 
their wealth cent by cent, and carry each cent home 
with them at night, it would be some years before 
they became millionaires. This is but a faint symbol 
of the slow process by which nature has piled up her 
riches. She has had no visions of sudden wealth. To 
clothe the earth with soil made from the disinte- 
grated mountains — can we figure that time to our- 
selves? The Orientals try to get a hint of eternity by 
saying that when the Himalayas have been ground 
to powder by allowing a gauze veil to float against 
them once in a thousand years, eternity will only 
have just begun. Our mountains have been pul- 
verized by a process almost as slow. In our case the 
gauze veil is the air, and the rains, and the snows, 
before which even granite crumbles. See what the 
god of erosion, in the shape of water, has done in the 

8 



THE LONG ROAD 

river valleys and gorges — cut a mile deep in the 
Colorado canyon, and yet this canyon is but of yes- 
terday in geologic time. Only give the evolutionary 
god time enough and all these miracles are surely 
wrought. 

Truly it is hard for us to realize what a part time 
has played in the earth's history, — just time, dur- 
ation, — so slowly, oh, so slowly, have the great 
changes been brought about! The turning of mud 
and silt into rock in the bottom of the old seas seems 
to have been merely a question of time. Mud does 
not become rock in man's time, nor vegetable mat- 
ter become coal. These processes are too slow for us. 
The flexing and folding of the rocky strata, miles 
deep, under an even pressure, is only a question of 
time. Allow time enough and force enough, and a 
layer of granite may be bent like a bow. The crys- 
tals of the rock seem to adjust themselves to the 
strain, and to take up new positions, just as they do, 
much more rapidly, in a cake of ice under pressure. 
Probably no human agency could flex a stratum of 
rock, because there is not time enough, even if there 
were power enough. "A low temperature acting 
gradually," says my geology, " during an indefinite 
age would produce results that could not be other- 
wise brought about even through greater heat." 
"Give us time," say the great mechanical forces, 
"and we will show you the immobile rocks and your 
rigid mountain chains as flexible as a piece of 

9 



TIME AND CHANGE 

leather." "Give us time," say the dews and the 
rains and the snowflakes, "and we will make you 
a garden out of those same stubborn rocks and 
frowning ledges." "Give us time," says Life, start- 
ing with her protozoans in the old Cambrian seas, 
"and I will not stop till I have peopled the earth 
with myriad forms and crowned them all with 
man." 

Dana thinks that had "a man been living during 
the changes that produced the coal, he would not 
have suspected their progress," so slow and quiet 
were they. It is probable that parts of our own sea- 
coast are sinking and other parts rising as rapidly as 
the oscillation of the land and sea went on that re- 
sulted in the laying down of the coal measures. 

An eternity to man is but a day in the cosmic pro- 
cess. In the face of geologic time, man's appearance 
upon the earth as man, with a written history, is 
something that has just happened; it was in this 
morning's paper, we read of it at breakfast. As 
evolution goes, it will not be old news yet for a hun- 
dred thousand years or so, and by that time, what 
will he have done, if he goes on at his present rate 
of accelerated speed ? Probably he will not have 
caught the gods of evolution at their work, or wit- 
nessed the origin of species by natural descent, these 
things are too slow for him; but he will certainly 
have found out many things that we are all eager 
to know. 

10 



THE LONG ROAD 

In nature as a whole we see results and not pro- 
cesses. We see the rock strata bent and folded, we 
see the whole mountain-chains flexed and shortened 
by the flexure; but had we been present, we should 
not have suspected what was going on. Our little 
span of life does not give us the parallax necessary. 
The rock strata, miles thick, may be being flexed 
now under our feet, and we know it not. The earth 
is shrinking, but so slowly! When, under the slow 
strain, the strata suddenly give way or sink, and an 
earthquake results, then we know something has 
happened. 

A recent biologist and physicist thinks, and doubt- 
less thinks wisely, that the reason why we have 
never been able to produce living from non-living 
matter in our laboratories, is that we cannot take 
time enough. Even if we could bring about the con- 
ditions of the early geologic ages in which life had 
its dawn, which of course we cannot, we could not 
produce life because we have not geologic time at 
our disposal. 

The reaction which we call life was probably as 
much a cosmic or geologic event as were the reactions 
which produced the different elements and com- 
pounds, and demanded the same slow gestation in 
the womb of time. During what cycles upon cycles 
the great mother-forces of the universe must have 
brooded over the inorganic before the organic was 
brought forth! The archean age, during which the 

11 



TIME AND CHANGE 

brooding seems to have gone on, was probably as 
long as all the ages since. 

How we are baffled when we talk about the begin- 
ning of anything in nature or in our own lives ! In 
our experience there must be a first, but when did 
manhood begin; when did puberty, when did old 
age, begin ? When did each stage of our mental 
growth begin ? When or where did the English lan- 
guage begin, or the French, or the German ? Was 
there a first English word spoken ? From the first 
animal sound, if we can conceive of such, up to the 
human speech of to-day, there is an infinite grada- 
tion of sounds and words. 

Was there a first summer, a first winter, a first 
spring ? There could hardly have been a first day 
even for ages and ages, but only slowly approxi- 
mating day. After an immense lapse of time the air 
must have cleared and the day become separated 
from the night, and the seasons must have become 
gradually defined. Things slowly emerge one after 
another from a dim, nebulous condition, both in our 
own growth and experience and in the development 
of the physical universe. 

In nature there is no first and last. There is an 
endless beginning and an endless ending. There was 
no first man or first woman, no first bird, or fish, or 
reptile. Back of each one stretches an endless chain 
of approximating men and birds and reptiles. 

This talk about the time and place where man 
12 



THE LONG ROAD 

began his existence seems to me misleading, be- 
cause it appears to convey the idea that he began 
as man at some time, in some place. Whereas he 
grew. He began where and when the first cell ap- 
peared, and he has been on the road ever since. 
There is no point in the line where he emerged from 
the not-man and became man. He was emerging 
from the not-man for millions of years, and when 
you put your finger on an animal form and say, 
This is man, you must go back through whole geo- 
logic periods before you reach the not-man. If Dar- 
win is right, there is no more reason for believing 
that the different species or forms of animal life were 
suddenly introduced than there is for believing that 
the soil, or the minerals, gold, silver, diamonds, or 
vegetable mold and verdure were suddenly intro- 
duced. 

ii 

If we know anything of the earth's past history, 
we know that the continents were long in forming, 
that they passed through many vicissitudes of heat 
and cold, of fire and flood, of upheaval and sub- 
sidence — that they had, so to speak, their first 
low, simple rudimentary or invertebrate life, that 
they were all slow in getting their backbones, slower 
still in clothing their rock ribs with soil and ver- 
dure, that they passed through a sort of amphibian 
stage, now under water, now on dry land, that 
their many kinds of soils and climes were not differ- 

13 



TIME AND CHANGE 

entiated and their complex water-systems estab- 
lished till well into Tertiary times — in short, that 
they have passed more and more from the simple 
to the complex, from the disorganized to the organ- 
ized. When man comes to draw his sustenance 
from their breasts, may they not be said to have 
reached the mammalian stage ? 

The fertile plain and valley and the rounded hill 
are of slow growth, immensely slow. But any given 
stage of the earth has followed naturally from the 
previous stage, only more and more and higher and 
higher forces took a hand in the game. First its ele- 
ments passed through the stage of fire, then through 
the stage of water, then merged into the stage of air. 
More and more the aerial elements — oxygen, car- 
bon, nitrogen — have entered into its constituents 
and fattened the soil. The humanizing of the earth 
has been largely a process of oxidation. More than 
disintegrated rock makes up the soil; the air and the 
rains and the snows have all contributed a share. 

The history of the soil which we turn with our 
spade, and stamp with our shoes, covers millions 
upon millions of years. It is the ashes of the moun- 
tains, the leavings of untold generations of animal 
and vegetable life. It came out of the sea, it drifted 
from the heavens; it flowed out from the fiery heart 
of the globe; it has been worked over and over by 
frost and flood, blown by winds, shoveled by ice, 
— mixed and kneaded and moulded as the house- 

14 



THE LONG ROAD 

wife kneads and moulds her bread, — refining and 
refining from age to age. Much of it was held in 
solution in the primordial seas, whence it was fil- 
tered and used and precipitated by countless forms 
of marine life, making a sediment that in time be- 
came rocks, that again in time became continents 
or parts of them, which the aerial forces reduced to 
soil. Indeed, the soil itself is an evolution, as much 
so as the life upon it. 

We probably have little conception of how inti- 
mate and cooperative all parts of the universe are 
with one another, — of the debt we owe to the far- 
thest stars, and to the remotest period of time. We 
must owe a debt to the monsters of Mesozoic and 
Caenozoic time; they helped to fertilize the soil for 
us, and to discipline the ruder forces of life. We owe a 
debt to all that has gone before : to the heavens above 
and to the earth-fires beneath, to the ice-sheets that 
ground down the mountains, and to the ocean cur- 
rents. Just as we owe a debt to the men and women 
in our line of descent, so we owe a debt to the ruder 
primordial forces that shaped the planet to our use, 
and took a hand in the game of animal life. 

The gods of evolution had served a long appren- 
ticeship; they had gained proficiency and were mas- 
ter workmen. Or shall we say that the elements of 
life had become more plastic and adaptable, or that 
the life fund had accumulated, so to speak? Had 
the vast succession of living beings, the long ex- 

15 



TIME AND CHANGE 

perience in organization, at last made the problem 
of the origin of man easier to solve? 

One fancies every living thing as not only re- 
turning its mineral elements to the soil, but as in 
some subtle way leaving its vital forces also, and 
thus contributing to the impalpable, invisible store- 
house of vital energy of the globe. 

At first among the mammalian tribes there was 
much muscle and little brains. But in the middle 
Tertiary the mammal brain began suddenly to en- 
large, so that in our time the brain of the horse is 
more than eight times the size of the brain of his 
progenitor, the dinoceras of Eocene times. 

Nature seems to have experimented with brains 
and nerve ganglia, as she has with so many other 
things. The huge reptilian creatures of Mesozoic 
time — the various dinosaurs — had ridiculously 
small heads and brains, but they had what might 
be called supplementary brains well toward the 
other end of the body, — great nervous masses near 
the sacrum, many times the size of the ostensible 
brain, which no doubt performed certain brain func- 
tions. But the principle of centralization was at 
work, and when in later time we reach the higher 
mammalian forms, we find these outlying nervous 
masses called in, so to speak, and concentrated in 
the head. 

Nature has tried the big, the gigantic, over and 
over, and then abandoned it. In Carboniferous 

16 



THE LONG ROAD 

times there was a gigantic dragon-fly, measuring 
more than two feet in the expanse of wings. Still 
earlier, there were gigantic mollusks and sea scor- 
pions, a cephalopod larger than a man; then gigan- 
tic fishes and amphibians and reptiles, followed by 
enormous mammals. But the geologic record shows 
that these huge forms did not continue. The mol- 
lusks that last unchanged through millions of years 
are the clam and the oyster of our day. The huge 
mosses and tree-ferns are gone, and only their 
humbler types remain. Among men giants are 
short-lived. 

On the other hand, the steady increase in size of 
certain other species of animals during the later geo- 
logic ages is a curious and interesting fact. The first 
progenitors of the elephant that have been found 
show a small animal that steadily grew through the 
ages till the animal as we now find it is reached. 
Among the invertebrates this same progressive in- 
crease in size has been noted, a small shell in 
the Devonian becoming enormous in the Triassic. 
Certain species of sharks of medium size in the 
lower Eocene continue to increase till they attain 
the astounding dimensions in the Miocene and Plio- 
cene of over one hundred feet long. A certain fish 
appearing in the Devonian as a small fish of seven 
centimetres in length, becomes in the Carboniferous 
era a creature twenty-seven centimetres in length. 
Among the mammals of Tertiary times this same 

17 



TIME AND CHANGE 

law of steady increase in size has been operative, 
as seen in the Felidce, the stag, and the antelope. 
Man himself has, no doubt, been under the same 
law, and is probably a much larger animal than any 
of his Tertiary ancestors. In the vegetable world 
this process, in many cases, at least, has been re- 
versed, and the huge treelike club-mosses and horse- 
tails of Carboniferous times have dwindled in our 
time to very insignificant herbaceous forms. 

Animals of overweening size are handicapped in 
many ways, so that nature in most cases finally 
abandons the gigantic and sticks to the medium 
and the small. 

in 

Can we fail to see the significance of the order in 
which life has appeared upon the globe — the as- 
cending series from the simple to the more and more 
complex? Can we doubt that each series is the out- 
come of the one below it — that there is a logical 
sequence from the protozoa up through the inver- 
tebrates, the vertebrates, to man? Is it not like all 
that we know of the method of nature? Could we 
substitute the life of one period for that of another 
without doing obvious violence to the logic of na- 
ture? Is there no fundamental reason for the gra- 
dation we behold? 

All animal life lowest in organization is earliest in 
time, and vice versa, the different classes of a sub- 
kingdom, and the different orders of a class, suc- 

18 



THE LONG ROAD 

ceeding one another, as Cope says, in the relative 
order of their zoological rank. Thus the sponges are 
later than the protozoa, the corals succeed the 
sponges, the sea-urchins come after the corals, the 
shell-fish follow the sea-urchins, the articulates are 
later than the shell-fish, the vertebrates are later 
than the articulates. Among the former, the am- 
phibian follows the fish, the reptile follows the am- 
phibian, the mammal follows the reptile, and non- 
placental mammals are followed by the placental. 

It almost seems as if nature hesitated whether to 
produce the mammal from the reptile or from the 
amphibian, as the mammal bears marks of both 
in its anatomy, and which was the parent stem is 
still a question. 

The heart started as a simple tube in the Lepto- 
cardii; it divides itself into two cavities in the 
fishes, into three in the reptiles, and into four in the 
birds and mammals. So the ossification of the ver- 
tebral column takes place progressively, from the 
Silurian to the middle Jurassic. 

The same ascending series of creation as a whole 
is repeated in the inception and development of 
every one of the higher animals to-day. Each one 
begins as a single cell, which soon becomes a con- 
geries of cells, which is followed by congeries of con- 
geries of cells, till the highly complex structure of the 
grown animal with all its intricate physiological 
activities and specialization of parts, is reached. It 

19 



TIME AND CHANGE 

is typical of the course of the creative energy from 
the first unicellular life up to man, each succeeding 
stage flowing out of, and necessitated by, the pre- 
ceding stage. 

How slowly and surely the circulatory system 
improved! From the cold-blooded animal to the 
warm-blooded is a great advance. In the warm- 
blooded is developed the capacity to maintain a 
fixed temperature while that of the surrounding 
medium changes. The brain and nervous system dis- 
play the same progressive ascent from the brainless 
acrania, up through the fishes, batrachia, reptiles, 
and birds to the top in mammals. The same with the 
skeletons in the invertebrates, from membrane to 
cartilage, from cartilage to bone, so that the primi- 
tive cartilage remaining in any part of the skeleton 
is considered a mark of inferiority. 

According to Cope, there has been progressive 
improvement in the mechanism of the body — it 
has become a better and better machine. The sus- 
pension of the lower jaw, so as to bring the teeth 
nearer the power, — the masseter and related mus- 
cles, — was a slow evolution and a great advance. 
The fin is more primitive than the limb; the limbs 
themselves display a constantly increasing differen- 
tiation of parts from the batrachian to the mamma- 
lian. There was no good ankle joint in early Eocene 
times. The model ankle joint is a tongue and groove 
arrangement, and this is a later evolution. In Eo- 

20 



THE LONG ROAD 

cene times they were nearly all flat. The arched 
foot, too, comes in; this is an advance on the flat 
foot. The bones of the palms and soles are not locked 
until the later Tertiary. The vertebral column pro- 
gressed in the same way, from flat to the double 
curve and the interlocking process, thus securing 
greatest strength with greatest mobility. In the 
earliest life locomotion was diffused, later it be- 
came concentrated. The worm walks with its 
whole body. 

IV 

If we figure to ourselves the geologic history of the 
earth under the symbol of a year of three hundred 
and sixty-five days, each day a million years, which 
is probably not far out of the way, then man, the 
biped, the Homo sapiens, in relation to this immense 
past, is of to-day, or of this very morning; while the 
origin of the first vertebrates, the fishes, from which 
he has arisen, falls nearer the middle of the great 
year. Or, dividing this geologic year into four di- 
visions or seasons, primary, secondary, tertiary, and 
quaternary, the fishes fall in the primary, the rep- 
tiles in the secondary, the mammals in the ter- 
tiary, and man in the early quaternary. 

If the fluid earth hardened, and the seas were 
formed in the first month of this year, then probably 
the first beginning of life appeared in the second 
month, the invertebrate in the third or fourth, — 
March or April, — the vertebrates in May or June, 

21 



TIME AND CHANGE 

the amphibians in July or August, the reptiles in 
August or September, the mammals in October or 
November, and man in December, — separated 
from the first beginnings of life by all those mil- 
lions upon millions of years. 

If life is a ferment, as we are told it is, how long 
it took this yeast to leaven the whole loaf! Man 
is evidently the end of the series, he is the top of 
the biological tree. His specialization upon physical 
lines seems to have ended far back in geologic time; 
his future specialization and development is evi- 
dently to be upon mental and spiritual lines. Na- 
ture, as I have said, began to tend more and more to 
brains in the early Tertiary, — the autumn of the 
great year; her best harvest began to mature then, 
her grain began to ripen. Indeed, this increased 
cephalization of animal life in the fall of the great 
year does suggest a kind of ripening process, the 
turning of the sap and milk, which had been so 
abundant and so riotous in the earlier period, into 
fibre and fruit and seed. 

May it not be that that long and sultry spring and 
summer of the earth's early history, a time prob- 
ably longer than has since elapsed, played a part 
in the development of life analogous to that played 
by our spring and summer, making it opulent, varied, 
gigantic, and making possible the condensation 
and refinement that came with man in the recent 
period? 

22 



THE LONG ROAD 

The earth is a pretty big apple, and the solar tree 
upon which it hangs is a pretty big tree, but why 
may it not have gone through a kind of ripening 
process for all that? its elements becoming less crude 
and acrid, and better suited to sustain the higher 
forms, as the eons passed? 

At any rate, the results seem to justify such a fancy. 
The earth has slowly undergone a change that may 
fairly be called a ripening process; its soil has deep- 
ened and mellowed, its harsher features have soft- 
ened, more and more color has come to its surface, 
the flowers have bloomed, the more succulent fruits 
have developed, the air has cleared, and love and 
benevolence and altruism have been born in the 
world. 

v 

Life had to creep or swim long before it could 
walk, and it walked long before it could fly; it had 
feeling long before it had eyes, and it no doubt had 
eyes long before it could hear or smell. It was ca- 
pable of motion long before it had limbs; it assimi- 
lated food long before it had a mouth or a stomach. 
It had a digestive tract long before it had a spinal 
cord; it had nerve ganglia long before it had a well- 
defined brain. It had sensation long before it had 
perception; it was unisexual long before it was bi- 
sexual; it had a shell long before it had a skeleton; 
it had instinct and reflex action long before it had 
self-consciousness and reason. Always from the 

23 



TIME AND CHANGE 

lower to the higher, from the simple to the more 
complex, and always slowly, gently. 

Life has had its foetal stage, its stage of infancy, 
and childhood, and maturity, and will doubtless 
have its old age. It took it millions upon millions of 
years to get out of the sea upon dry land; and it 
took it more millions upon dry land, or since the 
Carboniferous age, when the air probably first be- 
gan to be breathable, — all the vast stretch of the 
Secondary and Tertiary ages, — to get upright and 
develop a reasoning brain, and reach the estate of 
man. Step by step, in orderly succession, does crea- 
tion move. In the rising and in the setting of the 
sun one may see how nature's great processes steal 
upon us, silently and unnoticed, yet always in 
sequence, stage succeeding stage, one thing following 
from another, the spectacular moment of sunset fol- 
lowing inevitably from the quiet, unnoticed sinking 
of the sun in the west, or the startling flash of his 
rim above the eastern horizon only the fulfillment of 
the promise of the dawn. All is development and 
succession, and man is but the sunrise of the dawn 
of life in Cambrian or Silurian times, and is linked to 
that time as one hour of the day is linked to another. 

The more complex life became, the more rapidly 
it seems to have developed, till it finally makes 
rapid strides to reach man. One seems to see Life, 
like a traveler on the road, going faster and faster 
as it nears its goal. Those long ages of unicellular 

24 



THE LONG ROAD 

life in the old seas, how immense they appear to have 
been; then how the age of invertebrates dragged 
on, millions upon millions of years; then the age" of 
fishes; the Palaeozoic age, how vast — put by 
Haeckel at thirty-four millions of years, adding 
rock strata forty-one thousand feet thick ; then the 
Mesozoic or third period, the age of reptiles, eleven 
million years, with strata twelve thousand feet thick. 
Then came the Caenozoic age, or age of mammals, 
three million years, with strata thirty-one hundred 
feet thick. The god of life was getting in a hurry 
now; man was not far off. A new device, the pla- 
centa, was hit upon in this age, and probably the 
diaphragm and the brain of animals, all greatly en- 
larged. Finally comes the Anthropozoic or Quater- 
nary age, the age of man, three hundred thousand 
years, with not much addition to the sedimentary 
rocks. 

Man seems to be the net result of it all, of all these 
vast cycles of Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, and Caenozoic 
life. He is the one drop finally distilled from the 
vast weltering sea of lower organic forms. * It looks 
as if it all had to be before he could be — all the 
delay and waste and struggle and pain — all that 
long carnival of sea life, all that saturnalia of gigan- 
tic forms upon the land and in the air, all that rising 
and sinking of the continents, and all that shovel- 
ing to and fro and mixing of the soils, before the 
world was ready for him. 

25 



TIME AND CHANGE 

In the early Tertiary, millions of years ago, the 
earth seems to have been ripe for man. The fruits 
and vegetables and the forest trees were much as we 
know them, the animals that have been most serv- 
iceable to us were here, spring and summer and 
fall and winter came and went, evidently birds sang, 
insects hummed, flowers bloomed, fruits and grains 
and nuts ripened, and yet man as man was not. 

Under the city of London is a vast deposit of 
clay in which thousands of specimens of fossil 
fruit have been found like our date, cocoanut, areca, 
custard-apple, gourd, melon, coffee, bean, pepper, 
and cotton plant, but no sign of man. Why was 
his development so tardy? What animal profited 
by this rich vegetable life? The hope and promise 
of the human species at that time probably slept in 
some lowly marsupial. Man has gathered up into 
himself, as he traveled his devious way, all the best 
powers of the animal kingdom he has passed through. 
His brain supplies him with all that his body lacks, 
and more. His specialization is in this highly de- 
veloped organ. It is this that separates him so 
widely from all other animals. 

Man has no wings, and yet he can soar above the 
clouds; he is not swift of foot, and yet he can out- 
speed the fleetest hound or horse; he has but feeble 
weapons in his organization, and yet he can slay 
or master all the great beasts; his eye is not so sharp 
as that of the eagle or the vulture, and yet he can see 

26 



THE LONG ROAD 

into the farthest depths of siderial space; he has 
only very feeble occult powers of communication 
with his fellows, and yet he can talk around the 
world and send his voice across mountains and 
deserts; his hands are weak things beside a lion's 
paw or an elephant's trunk, and yet he can move 
mountains and stay rivers and set bounds to the 
wildest seas. His dog can out-smell him and out- 
run him and out-bite him, and yet his dog looks up 
to him as to a god. He has erring reason in place of 
unerring instinct, and yet he has changed the face of 
the planet. 

Without the specialization of the lower animals, 
— their wonderful adaptation to particular ends, — 
their tools, their weapons, their strength, their 
speed, man yet makes them all his servants. His 
brain is more than a match for all the special ad- 
vantages nature has given them. The one gift of 
reason makes him supreme in the world. 

VI 

We have a stake in all the past life of the globe. 
It is no doubt a scientific fact that your existence 
and mine were involved in the first cell that ap- 
peared, that the first zoophyte furthered our for- 
tunes, that the first worm gave us a lift. Great good 
luck came to us when the first pair of eyes were in- 
vented, probably by the trilobite back in Silurian 
times; when the first ear appeared, probably ir\ 

27 



TIME AND CHANGE 

Carboniferous times; when the first pair of lungs 
grew out of a fish's air-bladder, probably in Triassic 
times; when the first four-chambered heart was 
developed and double circulation established, prob- 
ably with the first warm-blooded animal in Meso- 
zoic times. 

These humble forms started the brain, the nerv- 
ous system, the circulation, sight, hearing, smell; 
they invented the liver, the kidneys, the lungs, the 
heart, the stomach, and led the way to every organ 
and power my body and mind have to-day. They 
were the pioneers, they were the dim remote fore- 
bears, they conserved and augmented the fund of 
life and passed it along. 

All their struggles, their discipline, their battles, 
their failures, their successes, were for you and me. 
Man has had the experience of all the animals be- 
low him. He has suffered and struggled as a fish, 
he has groveled and devoured as a reptile, he has 
fought and triumphed as a quadruped, he has lived 
in trees as a monkey, he has inhabited caves with the 
wolf and the bear, he has roamed the forests and 
plains as a savage, he has survived without fire or 
clothes or weapons or tools, he has lived with the 
mastodon and all the saurian monsters, he has held 
his own against great odds, he has survived the long 
battles of the land and the sea, he weathered the 
ice-sheet that overrode both hemispheres, he has 
seen many forms become extinct. In the historic 

28 



THE LONG ROAD 

period he has survived plague and pestilence, and 
want and famine. What must he have survived in 
prehistoric times ! What must he have had to con- 
tend with as a cave-dweller, as a tree-dweller, as 
a river-drift man! Before he had tools or weapons 
what must he have had to contend with! 

Nature was full of sap and rioted in rude strength 
well up to Quaternary times, producing extravagant 
forms which apparently she had no use for, as she 
has discontinued them. 

In all these things you and I had our part and lot; 
of this prodigal outpouring of life we have reaped 
the benefit; amid these bizarre forms and this car- 
nival of lust and power, the manward impulse was 
nourished and forwarded. In Eocene times nearly 
half the mammals lived on other animals; it must 
have been an age of great slaughter. It favored the 
development of fleetness and cunning, in which we 
too have an interest. Our rude progenitor was surely 
there in some form, and escaped the slaughter. Then 
or later it is thought he took to the trees to escape 
his enemies, as the rats in Jamaica have taken to the 
trees to escape the mongoose. To his tree-climbing 
we probably owe our hand, with its opposing thumb. 

In all his disguises he is still our ancestor. His 
story reads like a fairy book. Never did nimble 
fancy of childhood invent such transformations — 
only the transformations are so infinitely slow, and 
attended with such struggle and suffering. Strike 

29 



TIME AND CHANGE 

out the element of time and we have before us a 
spectacle more novel and startling than any ho- 
cus-pocus or legerdemain that ever set the crowd 
agape. 

In every form man has passed through, he left 
behind some old member or power and took on some 
new. He left his air-bladder and his gills and his fins 
with the fishes; he got his lungs from the dipno- 
ans, the precursors of the amphibians, and from 
these last he got his four limbs; he left some part of 
his anatomy with the reptile, and took something 
in exchange, probably his flexible neck. Somewhere 
along his line he picked up the four-chambered 
heart, the warm blood, the placenta, the diaphragm, 
the plantigrade foot, the mammary glands — indeed, 
what has he not picked up on the long road of his 
many transformations? He left some of his super- 
fluous forty-four teeth with his ancestral quadru- 
mana of Eocene times, and kept thirty-two. He 
picked up his brain somewhere on the road, prob- 
ably far back in Palaeozoic times, but how has he 
developed and enlarged it, till it is now the one su- 
preme thing in the world! His fear, his cunning, his 
anger, his treachery, his hoggishness — all his ani- 
mal passions — he brought with him from his animal 
ancestors; but his moral and spiritual nature, his 
altruism, his veneration, his religious emotions, 
his aesthetic perceptions — have come to him as 
a man, supplementing his lower nature, as it were, 

20 



THE LONG ROAD 

with another order of senses — a finer sight, a finer 
touch, wrought in him by the discipline of life, and 
the wonder of the world about him, beginning de 
novo in him only as the wing began de novo in the 
bird, or the color began de novo in the flower — ■ 
struck out from preexisting potentialities. The fa- 
ther of the eye is the light, and the father of fthe ear 
is the vibration of the air, but the father of man's 
higher nature is a question of quite another sort. 
About the only thing in his physical make-up that 
man can call his own is his chin. None of the orders 
below him seem to have what can strictly be called 
a chin. 

Man owes his five toes and five fingers to the 
early amphibians of the sub-carboniferous times. 
The first tangible evidence of these five toes upon 
the earth is, to me, very interesting. The earliest 
record of them that I have heard of is furnished 
by a slab of shale from Pennsylvania, upon which, 
while it was yet soft mud, our first five-toed ances- 
tor had left the imprint of his four feet. He was evi- 
dently a small, short-legged gentleman with a stride 
of only about thirteen inches, and he carried a tail 
instead of a cane. He was probably taking a stroll 
upon the shores of that vast Mediterranean Sea that 
occupied all the interior of the continent when he 
crossed his mud flat. It was raining that morning — ■ 
how many million years ago? — as we know from the 
imprint of the raindrops upon the mud. Probably 

31 



TIME AND CHANGE 

the shower did not cause him to quicken his pace, 
as amphibians rather like the rain. Just what his 
immediate forbears were like, or what the forms 
were that connected him with the fishes, we shall 
probably never know. Doubtless the great book 
of the rocky strata somewhere holds the secret, if 
we are ever lucky enough to open it at the right 
place. How many other secrets, that evolutionists 
would like to know, those torn and crumpled leaves 
hold! 

It is something to me to know that it rained that 
day when our amphibian ancestor ventured out. 
The weather was beginning to get organized also, 
and settling down to business. It had got beyond 
the state of perpetual mist and fog of the earlier 
ages, and the raindrops were playing their parts. 
Yet, from all the evidence we have, we infer that the 
climate was warm and very humid, like that of a 
greenhouse, and that vegetation, mostly giant ferns 
and rushes and lycopods, was very rank, but there 
was no grass, or moss, no deciduous trees, or flowers, 
or fruit, as we know these things. 

A German anatomist says that we have the ves- 
tiges of one hundred and eighty organs which have 
stuck to us from our animal ancestors, — now use- 
less, or often worse than useless, like the vermiform 
appendix. Eleven of these superannuated and ob- 
solete organs we bring from the fishes, four from 
amphibians and reptiles. The external ear is a ves- 



THE LONG ROAD 

tige — of no use any more. Our dread of snakes we 
no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors. 

How life refined and humanized as time went on, 
sobered down and became more meditative, keep- 
ing step, no doubt, with the amelioration of the soil 
out of which all life finally comes. Life's bank ac- 
count in the soil was constantly increasing; more 
and more of the inorganic was wrought up into the 
organic; the value of every clod underfoot was raised. 
The riot of gigantic forms ceased, and they became 
ashes. The giant and uncouth vegetation ceased, 
and left ashes or coal. The beech, the maple, the 
oak, the olive, the palm came in. The giant sea- 
serpents disappeared; the horse, the ox, the swine, 
the dog, the quail, the dove came in. The placental 
mammals developed. The horse grew in size and 
beauty. When we first come upon his trail, he is a 
four-hoof-toed animal no larger than a fox. Later 
on we find him the size of a sheep with one of his 
toes gone; still later — many hundred thousand 
years, no doubt — we find him the size of a donkey, 
with still fewer toes, and so on till we reach the 
superb creature we know. 

The creative energy seems to have worked in 
geologic time and in the geologic field just as it 
works here and now, in yonder vineyard or in yonder 
marsh, — blindly, experimentally, but persistently 
and successfully. The winged seeds find their proper 
soil, because they search in every direction; the 



TIME AND CHANGE 

climbing vines find their support, because in the 
same blind way they feel in all directions. Plants 
and animals and races of men grope their way to 
new fields, to new powers, to new inventions. 

Indeed, how like an inventor Nature has worked, 
constantly improving her models, adding to and 
changing as experience would seem to dictate! She 
has developed her higher and more complex forms 
as man has developed his printing-press, or steam- 
engine, from rude, simple beginnings. From the 
two-chambered heart of the fish she made the treble- 
chambered heart of the frog, and then the four- 
chambered heart of the mammal. The first mam- 
mary gland had no nipples; the milk oozed out and 
was licked off by the young. The nipple was a great 
improvement, as was the power of suckling in the 
young. 

Experimenting and experimenting endlessly, tak- 
ing a forward step only when compelled by neces- 
sity, — this is the way of Nature, — experimenting 
with eyes, with ears, with teeth, with limbs, with 
feet, with toes, with wings, with bladders and lungs, 
with scales and armors, hitting upon the back- 
bone only after long trials with other forms, hitting 
upon the movable eye only after long ages of other 
eyes, hitting on the mammal only after long ages 
of egg-laying vertebrates, hitting on the placenta 
only recently, — experimenting all around the circle, 
discarding and inventing, taking ages to perfect 

34 



THE LONG ROAD 

the nervous system, ages and ages to develop the 
centralized ganglia, the brain. First life was like 
a rabble, a mob, without thought or head, then slowly 
organization went on, as it were, from family to 
clan, from clan to tribe, from tribe to nation, or 
centralized government — the brain of man — all 
parts duly subordinated and directed, — millions 
of cells organized and working on different functions 
to one grand end, — cooperation, fraternization, 
division of labor, altruism, etc. 

The cell was the first invention; it is the unit of 
life, — a speck of protoplasm with a nucleus. To 
educate this cell till it could combine with its fellows 
and form the higher animals seems to have been the 
aim of the creative energy. First the cell, then com- 
binations of cells, then combinations of combina- 
tions, then more and more complex combinations 
till the body of man is reached, where endless con- 
fraternities of cells, all with different functions, 
working to build and sustain different organs, — 
brain, heart, liver, muscles, nerves, — yet all work- 
ing together for one grand end — the body and 
mind of man. In their last analysis, all made up of 
the same cells — their combinations and organiza- 
tion making the different forms. 

Evolution touches all forms but tarries with few. 
Many are called but few are chosen — chosen to 
lead the man-impulse upward. Myriads of forms 
are left behind, like driftwood caught in the eddies 

35 



TIME AND CHANGE 

of a current. The clam has always remained a clam, 
the oyster remained an oyster. The cockroach is 
about the same creature to-day that it was untold 
seons ago; so is the shark, and so are many other 
forms of marine life. Often where old species have 
gone out and new come in, no progress has been 
made. 

Evolution concentrates along certain lines. The 
biological tree behaves like another tree, branches 
die and drop off (species become extinct), others 
mature and remain, while some central shoot pushes 
upward. Many of the huge reptilian and mammalian 
branches perished in comparatively late times. 

As nothing is more evident than that the same 
measure of life or of vital energy — power of growth, 
power of resistance, power of reproduction — is not 
meted out equally to all the individuals of a species, 
or to all species, so it is evident that this power of 
progressive development is not meted out equally to 
all races of mankind, or to all of the individuals of 
the same race. The central impulse of development 
seems to have come from the East, in historic times 
at least, and to have followed the line of the Medi- 
terranean, to have culminated in Europe. And this 
progress has certainly been the work of a few minds 
— minds exceptionally endowed. 

For the most part the barbarian races do not pro- 
gress. Their exceptional minds or characters do not 
lead the tribes to higher planes of thought. In all 

36 



THE LONG ROAD 

countries we still see these barbarous people which 
man in his progress has left behind. Our civiliza- 
tion is like a field of light that fades off into shadows 
and darkness. There is this margin of undeveloped 
humanity on all sides. Always has it been so in 
the animal life of the globe; the higher forms have 
been pushed up from the lower, and the lower have 
remained and continued to multiply unchanged. 

It seems as if some central and cherished impulse 
had pushed on through each form, and by suc- 
cessive steps had climbed from height to height, 
gaining a little here and a little there, intensifying 
and concentrating as time went on, very vague and 
diffuse at first, embryonic so to speak, during the 
first half of the great geologic year, but quickening 
more and more, differentiating more and more, 
delayed and defeated many times, no doubt, yet 
never destroyed, leaving form after form unchanged 
behind it, till it at last reached its goal in man. 

After evolution has done all it can do for us toward 
solving the mystery of creation, much remains un- 
solved. 

Through evolution we see creation in travail- 
pains for millions of years to bring forth the varied 
forms of life as we know them; but the mystery of 
the inception of this life, and of the origin of the 
laws that have governed its development, remains. 
What lies back of it all? Who or what planted the 
germ of the biological tree, and predetermined all 

37 



TIME AND CHANGE 

its branches? What determined one branch to 
eventuate in man, another in the dog, the horse, 
the bird, or the reptile? 

From the finite or human point of view we feel 
compelled to say some vaster being or intelligence 
must have had the thought of all these things from 
the beginning or before the beginning. 

It is quite impossible for me to believe that for- 
tuitous variation — variation all around the circle — 
could have resulted in the evolution of man. There 
must have been a predetermined tendency to varia- 
tion in certain directions. To introduce chance into 
the world is to introduce chaos. No more would the 
waters of the interiors of the continents find their 
way to the sea, were there not a slant in that direc- 
tion, than could haphazard variation, though checked 
and controlled by natural selection, result in the 
production of the race of man. This view may be 
only the outcome of our inevitable anthropomor- 
phism which we cannot escape from, no matter how 
deep we dive or high we soar. 



II 

THE DIVINE ABYSS 



IN making the journey to the great Southwest, — 
Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, — if one 
does not know his geology, he is pretty sure to wish 
he did, there is so much geology scattered over all 
these Southwestern landscapes, crying aloud to be 
read. The book of earthly revelation, as shown by 
the great science, lies wide open in that land, as it 
does in few other places on the globe. Its leaves 
fairly flutter in the wind, and the print is so large 
that he who runs on the California Limited may 
read it. Not being able to read it at all, or not taking 
any interest in it, is like going to Rome or Egypt or 
Jerusalem, knowing nothing of the history of those 
lands. 

Of course, we have just as much geology in the 
East and Middle West, but the books are closed 
and sealed, as it were, by the enormous lapse of time 
since these portions of the continent became dry 
land. The eroding and degrading forces have ages 
since passed the meridian of their day's work, and 
grass and verdure hide their footsteps. But in the 
great West and Southwest, the gods of erosion and 

39 



TIME AND CHANGE 

degradation seem yet in the heat and burden of the 
day's toil. Their unfinished landscapes meet the eye 
on every hand. Many of the mountains look as if 
they were blocked out but yesterday, and one sees 
vast naked flood-plains, and painted deserts and 
bad lands and dry lake-bottoms, that suggest a 
world yet in the making. 

Some force has scalped the hills, ground the moun- 
tains, strangled the rivers, channeled the plains, laid 
bare the succession of geologic ages, stripping off 
formation after formation like a garment, or cutting 
away the strata over hundreds of square ijiiles, as 
we pry a slab from a rock — and has done it all but 
yesterday. If we break the slab in the prying, and 
thus secure only part of it, leaving an abrupt jagged 
edge on the part that remains, we have still a better 
likeness of the work of these great geologic quarry- 
men. But other workmen, invisible to our eyes, 
have carved these jagged edges into novel and beau- 
tiful forms. 

The East is old, old ! the West, with the exception 
of the Rocky Mountains, is of yesterday in compari- 
son. The Hudson was an ancient river before the 
Mississippi was born, and the Catskills were being 
slowly carved from a vast plateau while the rocks 
that were to form many of the Western ranges were 
being laid down as sediment in the bottom of the 
sea. California is yet in her teens, while New Eng- 
land in comparison is an octogenarian. Just as much 

40 



THE DIVINE ABYSS 

geology in the East as in the West, did I say? Not 
as much visible geology, not as much by many 
chapters of earth history, not as much by all the 
later formations, by most of the Mesozoic and Ter- 
tiary deposits. The vast series of sedimentary rocks 
since the Carboniferous age, to say nothing of the 
volcanic, that make up these periods, are largely 
wanting east of the Mississippi, except in New 
Jersey and in some of the Gulf States. They are 
recent. They are like the history of our own period 
compared with that of Egypt and Judea. It is 
mainly these later formations — the Permian, the 
Jurassic, the Triassic, the Cretaceous, the Eocene, 
— that give the prevailing features to the South- 
western landscape that so astonish Eastern eyes. 
From them come most of the petrified remains of 
that great army of extinct reptiles and mammals — 
the three- toed horse, the sabre-toothed tiger, the 
brontosaurus, the fin-backed lizard, the imperial 
mammoth, the various dinosaurs, some of them 
gigantic in form and fearful in aspect — that of late 
years have appeared in our museums and that throw 
so much light upon the history of the animal life of 
the globe. Most of the sedimentary rocks of New 
York and New England were laid down before these 
creatures existed. 

Now I am not going to write an essay on the geo- 
logy of the West, for I really have little first-hand 
knowledge upon that subject, but I would indicate 

41 



TIME AND CHANGE 

the kind of interest in the country I was most con- 
scious of during my recent trip to the Pacific Coast 
and beyond. Indeed, quite a geologic fever raged in 
me most of the time. The rocks attracted me more 
than the birds, the sculpturing of the landscapes 
engaged my attention more than the improvements 
of the farms — what Nature had done more than 
what man was doing. The purely scenic aspects of 
the country are certainly remarkable, and the 
human aspects interesting, but underneath these 
things, and striking through them, lies a vast 
world of time and change that to me is still more 
remarkable, and still more interesting. I could not 
look out of the car windows without seeing the 
spectre of geologic time stalking across the hills 
and plains. 

As one leaves the prairie States and nears the great 
Southwest, he finds Nature in a new mood — she is 
dreaming of canons; both cliffs and soil have canon 
stamped upon them, so that your eye, if alert, is 
slowly prepared for the wonders of rock-carving it 
is to see on the Colorado. The canon form seems 
inherent in soil and rock. The channels of the little 
streams are canons, vertical sides of adobe soil, as 
deep as they are broad, rectangle grooves in the 
ground. 

Through all this arid region nature is abrupt, an- 
gular, and sudden — the plain squarely abutting the 
cliff, the cliff walling the canon; the dry water-course 

42 



THE DIVINE ABYSS 

sunk in the plain like a carpenter's groove into a 
plank. Cloud and sky look the same as at home, 
but the earth is a new earth — new geologically, and 
new in the lines of its landscapes. It seems by the 
forms she develops that Nature must use tools that 
she long since discarded in the East. She works as if 
with the square and the saw and the compass, and 
uses implements that cut like chisels and moulding- 
planes. Right lines, well-defined angles, and table- 
like tops of buttes and mesas alternate with perfect 
curves, polished domes, carved needles, and fluted 
escarpments. 

In the features of our older landscapes there is 
little or nothing that suggests architectural forms 
or engineering devices; in the Far West one sees 
such forms and devices everywhere. 

In visiting the Petrified Forests in northern Ari- 
zona we stood on the edge of a great rolling plain 
and looked down upon a wide, deeply eroded stretch 
of country below us that suggested a vast army 
encampment, covered as it was with great dome- 
shaped, tent-like mounds of a light terra-cotta color, 
with open spaces like streets or avenues between 
them. There were hundreds or thousands of these 
earthy tents stretching away for twenty-five miles. 
Along the horizon was a gigantic stockade of red, 
rounded pillars, or a solid line of mosque-like temples. 
How unreal, how spectral it all seemed ! Not a sound 
or sign of life in the whole painted solitude — a de^ 

43 



TIME AND CHANGE 

serted camp, or one upon which the silence of death 
had fallen. Here, in Carboniferous times, grew the 
gigantic fern-like trees, the Sigillaria and Lepido- 
dendron, whose petrified trunks, for aeons buried 
beneath the deposit of the Permian seas, and then, 
during other seons, slowly uncovered by the gentle 
action of the eroding rains, we saw scattered on the 
ground. 

You first see Nature beginning to form the canon 
habit in Colorado and making preliminary studies 
for her masterpiece, the Grand Canon. Huge 
square towers and truncated cones and needles and 
spires break the horizon-lines. Here all her water- 
courses, wet or dry, are deep grooves in the soil, with 
striking and pretty carvings and modelings adorn- 
ing their vertical sides. In the railway cuts you see 
the same effects — miniature domes and turrets and 
other canon features carved out by the rains. The 
soil is massive and does not crumble like ours and 
seek the angle of repose; it gives way in masses like 
a brick wall. It is architectural soil, it seeks ap- 
proximately the right angle — the level plain or 
the vertical wall. It erodes easily under running 
water, but it does not slide; sand and clay are in 
such proportions as to make a brittle but not a 
friable soil. 

Before you are out of Colorado, you begin to see 
these novel architectural features on the horizon- 
line — the canon turned bottom side up, as it were. 

44 



THE DIVINE ABYSS 

In New Mexico, the canon habit of the erosion 
forces is still more pronounced. The mountain-lines 
are often as architectural in the distance, or arbi- 
trary, as the sky-line of a city. You may see what 
you half persuade yourself is a huge brick building 
notching the horizon, — an asylum, a seminary, a 
hotel, — but it is only a fragment of red sandstone, 
carved out by wind and rain. 

Presently the high colors of the rocks appear — 
high cliffs with terra-cotta fagades, and a new look 
in the texture of the rocks, a soft, beaming, less 
frowning expression, and colored as if by the Western 
sunsets. We are looking upon much younger rocks 
geologically than we see at home, and they have the 
tints and texture of youth. The landscape and 
the mountains look young, because they look un- 
finished, like a house half up. The workmen have 
but just knocked off work to go to dinner; their 
great trenches, their freshly opened quarries, their 
huge dumps, their foundations, their cyclopean 
masonry, their half -finished structures breaking the 
horizon-lines, their square gashes through the moun- 
tains, — all impress the eyes of a traveler from the 
eastern part of the continent, where the earth- 
building and earth-carving forces finished their 
work ages ago. 



45 



TIME AND CHANGE 

ii 

Hence it is that when one reaches the Grand 
Canon of the Colorado, if he has kept his eyes and 
mind open, he is prepared to see striking and unusual 
things. But he cannot be fully prepared for just 
what he does see, no matter how many pictures of 
it he may have seen, or how many descriptions of it 
he may have read. 

A friend of mine who took a lively interest in my 
Western trip wrote me that he wished he could have 
been present with his kodak when we first looked 
upon the Grand Caiion. Did he think he could 
have got a picture of our souls ? His camera would 
have shown him only our silent, motionless forms 
as we stood transfixed by that first view of the stu- 
pendous spectacle. Words do not come readily to 
one's lips, or gestures to one's body, in the presence 
of such a scene. One of my companions said that 
the first thing that came into her mind was the old 
text, "Be still, and know that I am God." To be 
still on such an occasion is the easiest thing in the 
world, and to feel the surge of solemn and reveren- 
tial emotions is equally easy; is, indeed, almost in- 
evitable. The immensity of the scene, its tranquil- 
lity, its order, its strange, new beauty, and the 
monumental character of its many forms — all these 
tend to beget in the beholder an attitude of silent 
wonder and solemn admiration. I wished at the 

46 



THE DIVINE ABYSS 

moment that we might have been alone with the 
glorious spectacle, — that we had hit upon an hour 
when the public had gone to dinner. The smoking 
and joking tourists sauntering along in apparent 
indifference, or sitting with their backs to the great 
geologic drama, annoyed me. I pity the person who 
can gaze upon the spectacle unmoved. Some are 
actually terrified by it. I was told of a strong man, 
an eminent lawyer from a Western city, who literally 
fell to the earth at the first view, and could not 
again be induced to look upon it. I saw a woman 
prone upon the ground near the brink at Hopi Point, 
weeping silently and long; but from what she after- 
ward told me I know it was not from terror or sor- 
row, but from the overpowering gladness of the in- 
effable beauty and harmony of the scene. It moved 
her like the grandest music. Her inebriate soul 
could find relief only in tears. 

Harriet Monroe was so wrought up by the first j 
view that she says she had to fight against the de- 
sperate temptation to fling herself down into the soft 
abyss, and thus redeem the affront which the very 
beating of her heart had offered to the inviolable 
solitude. Charles Dudley Warner said of it, " I ex- 
perienced for a moment an indescribable terror of 
nature, a confusion of mind, a fear to be alone in 
such a presence." 

It is beautiful, oh, how beautiful! but it is a 
beauty that awakens a feeling of solemnity and awe. 

47 



TIME AND CHANGE 

We call it the "Divine Abyss." It seems as much 
of heaven as of earth. Of the many descriptions of 
it, none seems adequate. To rave over it, or to pour 
into it a torrent of superlatives, is of little avail. My 
companion came nearer the mark when she quietly 
repeated from Revelation, "And he carried me away 
in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and 
shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem." It 
does, indeed, suggest a far-off, half -sacred antiquity, 
some greater Jerusalem, Egypt, Babylon, or India. 
We speak of it as a scene: it is more like a vision, 
so foreign is it to all other terrestrial spectacles, 
and so surpassingly beautiful. 

To ordinary folk the sight is so extraordinary, 
so unlike everything one's experience has yielded, 
and so unlike the results of the usual haphazard 
working of the blind forces of nature, that I did not 
wonder when people whom I met on the rim asked 
me what I supposed did all this. I could even sym- 
pathize with the remark of an old woman visitor 
who is reported to have said that she thought they 
had built the canon too near the hotel. The enorm- 
ous cleavage which the cation shows, the abrupt 
drop from the brink of thousands of feet, the sheer 
faces of perpendicular walls of dizzy height, give at 
first the impression that it is all the work of some 
titanic quarryman, who must have removed cubic 
miles of strata as we remove cubic yards of earth. 

Go out to Hopi Point or O'Neil's Point, and, as 
48 



THE DIVINE ABYSS 

you emerge from the woods, you get a glimpse of a 
blue or rose-purple gulf opening before you. The 
solid ground ceases suddenly, and an aerial perspec- 
tive, vast and alluring, takes its place; another hea- 
ven, countersunk in the earth, transfixes you on the 
brink. " Great God ! " I can fancy the first beholder 
of it saying, "what is this? Do I behold the trans- 
figuration of the earth? Has the solid ground melted 
into thin air? Is there a firmament below as well as 
above? Has the earth veil at last been torn aside, 
and the red heart of the globe been laid bare?" If 
this first witness was not at once overcome by the 
beauty of the earthly revelation before him, or terri- 
fied by its strangeness and power, he must have stood 
long, awed, spellbound, speechless with astonish- 
ment, and thrilled with delight. He may have seen 
vast and glorious prospects from mountain-tops, he 
may have looked down upon the earth and seen it 
unroll like a map before him; but he had never be- 
fore looked into the earth as through a mighty win- 
dow or open door, and beheld depths and gulfs of 
space, with their atmospheric veils and illusions and 
vast perspectives, such as he had seen from moun- 
tain-summits, but with a wealth of color and a 
suggestion of architectural and monumental re- 
mains, and a strange, almost unearthly beauty, such 
as no mountain-view could ever have afforded him. 
Three features of the canon strike one at once : its 
unparalleled magnitude, its architectural forms and 

49 



TIME AND CHANGE 

suggestions, and its opulence of color effects — a 
chasm nearly a mile deep and from ten to twenty 
miles wide, in which Niagara would be only as a 
picture upon your walls, in which the Pyramids, 
seen from the rim, would appear only like large 
tents, in which the largest building upon the earth 
would dwindle to insignificant proportions. There 
are amphitheatres and mighty aisles eight miles 
long and three or four miles wide and three or four 
thousand feet deep. There are room-like spaces eight 
hundred feet high; there are well-defined alcoves 
with openings a mile wide; there are niches six hun- 
dred feet high overhung by arched lintels; there are 
pinnacles and rude statues from one hundred to two 
hundred feet high. Here I am running at once into 
allusions to the architectural features and sugges- 
tions of the caiion, which must play a prominent 
part in all faithful attempts to describe it. There 
are huge, truncated towers, vast, horizontal mould- 
ings; there is the semblance of balustrades on the 
summit of a noble fagade. In one of the immense 
halls we saw, on an elevated platform, the outlines 
of three enormous chairs, fifty feet or more high, 
and behind and above them the suggestion of three 
more chairs in partial ruin. Indeed, there is such 
an opulence of architectural forms in this divine 
abyss as one has never before dreamed of see- 
ing wrought by the blind forces of nature. These 
forces have here foreshadowed all the noblest archi- 

50 



THE DIVINE ABYSS 

tecture of the world. Many of the vast carved and 
ornamental masses which diversify the canon have 
been fitly named temples, as Shiva's Temple, a mile 
high, carved out of the red Carboniferous limestone, 
and remarkably symmetrical in its outlines. Near 
it is the Temple of Isis, the Temple of Osiris, the 
Buddha Temple, the Horus Temple, and the Pyra- 
mid of Cheops. Farther to the east is the Diva Tem- 
ple, the Brahma Temple, the Temple of Zoroaster, 
and the Tomb of Odin. Indeed, everywhere are 
there suggestions of temples and tombs, pagodas and 
pyramids, on a scale that no work of human hands 
can rival. "The grandest objects," says Major Dut- 
ton," are merged in a congregation of others equally 
grand." With the wealth of form goes a wealth of 
color. Never, I venture to say, were reds and browns 
and grays and vermilions more appealing to the eye 
than they are as they softly glow in this great canon. 
The color-scheme runs from the dark, sombre hue 
of the gneiss at the bottom, up through the yellow- 
ish brown of the Cambrian layers, and on up through 
seven or eight broad bands of varying tints of red 
and vermilion, to the broad yellowish-gray at the 
top. 

in 

The north side of the canon has been much more 
deeply and elaborately carved than the south side; 
most of the great architectural features are on the 
north side — the huge temples and fortresses and 

51 



TIME AND CHANGE 

amphitheatres. The strata dip very gently to the 
north and northeast, while the slope of the surface 
is to the south and southeast. This has caused the 
drainage from the great northern plateaus to flow 
into the canon and thus cut and carve the north 
side as we behold it. 

The visitor standing upon the south side looks 
across the great chasm upon the bewildering maze 
of monumental forms, some of them as suggestive 
of human workmanship as anything in nature well 
can be, — crumbling turrets and foundations, forms 
as distinctly square as any work of man's hands, vast 
fortress-like structures with salients and entering 
angles and wing walls resisting the siege of time, 
huge pyramidal piles rising story on story, three 
thousand feet or more above their foundations, each 
successive story or superstructure faced by a huge 
vertical wall which rises from a sloping talus that 
connects it with the story next below. The slopes 
or taluses represent the softer rock, the vertical 
walls the harder layers. Usually four or five of these 
receding stories make up each temple or pyramid. 
Some of the larger structures show all the strata 
from the cap of light Carboniferous limestone at the 
top to the gray Cambrian sandstone at the bottom. 
From others, such as the Temple of Isis, all the 
upper formations are gone with a pile of disinte- 
grated red sandstone, like a mass of brick dust on 
the top where the fragment of the old red wall made 

52 



THE DIVINE ABYSS 

its last stand. In those masses, which are still 
crowned with the light gray limestone, one sees how 
surely the process of disintegration is going on by 
the fragments and debris of light gray rock, like the 
chips of giant workmen, that strew the deeper- 
colored slopes below them. These fragments fade 
out as the eye drops down the slopes, as if they had 
melted like bits of ice. Indeed, the melting of ice 
and the dissolution of a rock do not differ much ex- 
cept that one is very rapid and the other infinitely 
slow. In time (not man's time, but the Lord's 
time), all these light masses that cap the huge tem- 
ples will be weathered away, yea, and all the vast 
red layers beneath them, and the huge structures 
will be slowly consumed by time. The Colorado 
River will carry their ashes to the sea, and where 
they once stood will be seen gray, desert-like pla- 
teaus. Their outlines now stand out like skeletons 
from which the flesh has been removed — sharp, 
angular, obtrusive, but bound together as by liga- 
ments of granite. The tooth of time gnaws at them 
day and night and has been gnawing for thousands 
of centuries, so that in some cases only their stumps 
remain. From the Temple of Isis and the Tomb of 
Odin the two or three upper stories are gone. 

On the next page is the ground plan of the Temple 
of Isis, about twenty-five hundred feet high. The 
first story is about a thousand feet; the second, three 
hundred and fifty feet; the third, one hundred and 

53 




TIME AND CHANGE 

fifty feet; the fourth, five hundred feet; and the 
fifth, five hundred feet. The finish at the top shows 

as a heavy crumbling wall, 
probably one hundred feet 
or more high. How the mass 
seems to be resisting the 
siege of time, throwing out 
its salients here and there, 
and meeting the onset of the foes like a military 
engineer. 

The pyramidal form of these rock-masses is ac- 
counted for by the fact that they were carved out 
from the top downward, and that each successive 
story is vastly older than the one immediately be- 
neath it. The erosive forces have been working 
whole geologic ages longer on the top layer of rock 
than on the bottom layer; hence the topmost ones 
are entirely gone or else reduced to small dimensions. 
But what feature or quality of the rock it is that 
lends itself so readily or so inevitably to these archi- 
tectural forms — the four square foundations, the 
end pilasters and balustrades, and so on — is to 
me not so clear. The peculiar rectangular jointings, 
the alternation of soft and hard layers, the nearly 
horizontal strata, and other things, no doubt, enter 
into the problem. Many of these features are found 
in our older geology of the East, as in the Catskills 
— horizontal strata, hard and soft layers alternat- 
ing, but with the vertical jointing less pronounced; 

54 



THE DIVINE ABYSS 

hence the Catskills have few canon-like valleys, 
though there are here and there huge gashes through 
the mountains that give a canon effect, and there 
are gigantic walls high up on the face of some of the 
mountains that suggest one side of a mighty canon. 
In the climate of the Catskills the rock-masses of 
the Colorado would crumble much more rapidly 
than they do here. The lines of many of these nat- 
ural temples or fortresses are still more lengthened 
and attenuated than those of the Temple of Isis, 
appearing like mere skeletons of their former selves. 
The forms that weather out the formation above 
this, the Permian, appear to be more rotund, and 
tend more to domes and rounded hills. 

One of the most surprising features of the Grand 
Canon is its cleanness — its freedom from debris. 
It is a home of the gods, swept and garnished; no 
litter or confusion or fragments of fallen and broken 
rocky walls anywhere. Those vast sloping taluses 
are as clean as a meadow; rarely at the foot of the 
huge vertical walls do you see a fragment of fallen 
rock. It is as if the processes of erosion and de- 
gradation were as gentle as the dews and the snows, 
and carved out this mighty abyss grain by grain, 
which has probably been the case. That much of 
this red sandstone, from the amount of iron it con- 
tains, or from some other cause, disintegrates easily 
and rapidly, is very obvious. Looking down from 
Hopi Point upon a vast ridge called the " Man-of- 

55 



TIME AND CHANGE 

War," one sees on the top, where once there must 
have been a huge wall of rock, a long level area of 
red soil that suggests a garden, the more so because 
it is regularly divided up into sections by straight 
lines of huge stone placed as if by the hands of 
man. 

One's sense of the depths of the canon is so great 
that it almost makes one dizzy to see the little birds 
fly out over it, or plunge down into it. One seems 
to fear that they too will get dizzy and fall to the 
bottom. We watched a line of tourists on mules" 
creeping along the trail across the inner plateau, 
and the unaided eye had trouble to hold them; they 
looked like little red ants. The eye has more dif- 
ficulty in estimating sizes and distances beneath 
it than when they are above or on a level with it, 
because it is so much less familiar with depth than 
with height or lateral dimensions. 

Another remarkable and unexpected feature of 
the canon is its look of ordered strength. Nearly 
all the lines are lines of greatest strength. 
The prevailing profile line everywhere 
is that shown herewith. The upright 
lines represent lines of cyclopean ma- 
sonry, and the slant is the talus that 
connects them, covered with a short, 
sage-colored growth of some kind, and as soft to 
the eye as the turf of our fields. 
The simple, strong structural lines assert them- 
56 



THE DIVINE ABYSS 

selves everywhere, and give that look of repose 
and security characteristic of the scene. The rocky 
forces always seem to retreat in good order be- 
fore the onslaught of time; there is neither rout 
nor confusion; everywhere they present a calm up- 
right front to the foe. And the fallen from their 
ranks, where are they? A cleaner battlefield between 
the forces of nature one rarely sees. 

The weaker portions are, of course, constantly 
giving way. The elements incessantly lay siege to 
these fortresses and take advantage of every flaw 
or unguarded point, so that what stands has been 
seven times, yea, seventy times seven times tested, 
and hence gives the impression of impregnable 
strength. The angles and curves, the terraces and 
foundations, seem to be the work of some master 
engineer, with only here and there a toppling rock. 

I was puzzled to explain to myself the reason of a 
certain friendly and familiar look which the great 
abyss had for me. One sees or feels at a glance that 
it was not born of the throes and convulsions of na- 
ture — of earthquake shock or volcanic explosion. 
It does not suggest the crush of matter and the wreck 
of worlds. Clearly it is the work of the more gentle 
and beneficent forces. This probably accounts for 
the friendly look. Some of the inner slopes and 
plateaus seemed like familiar ground to me: I must 
have played upon them when a* school-boy. Bright 
Angel Creek, for some inexplicable reason, recalled 

57 



TIME AND CHANGE 

a favorite trout-stream of my native hills, and the 
old Cambrian plateau that edges the inner chasm, 
as we looked down upon it from nearly four thou- 
sand feet above, looked like the brown meadow 
where we played ball in the old school-days, friendly, 
tender, familiar, in its slopes and terraces, in its tints 
and basking sunshine, but grand and awe-inspiring 
in its depths, its huge walls, and its terrific precipices. 

The geologists are agreed that the canon is only 
of yesterday in geologic time, — the Middle Ter- 
tiary, — and yet behold the duration of that yes- 
terday as here revealed, probably a million years or 
more ! We can no more form any conception of such 
time than we can of the size of the sun or of the 
distance of the fixed stars. 

The forces that did all this vast delving and sculp- 
turing — the air, the rains, the frost, the sunshine — 
are as active now as they ever were; but their activ- 
ity is a kind of slumbering that rarely makes a sign. 
Only at long intervals is the silence of any part of 
the profound abyss broken by the fall of loosened 
rocks or sliding talus. We ourselves saw where a 
huge splinter of rock had recently dropped from the 
face of the cliff. In time these loosened masses dis- 
appear, as if they melted like ice. A city not made 
with hands, but as surely not eternal in the earth ! 
In our humid and severe Eastern climate, frost and 
ice and heavy rains working together, all these arch- 
itectural forms would have crumbled long ago, and 

58 



THE DIVINE ABYSS 

fertile fields or hill-slopes would have taken their 
place. In the older Hawaiian Islands, which prob- 
ably also date from Tertiary times, the rains have 
carved enormous canons and amphitheatres out of 
the hard volcanic rock, in some places grinding the 
mountains to such a thin edge that a man may liter- 
ally sit astride them, each leg pointing into opposite 
valleys. In the next geologic age, the temples and 
monuments of the Grand Canon will have largely 
disappeared, and the stupendous spectacle will be 
mainly a thing of the past. 

It seems to take millions of years to tame a moun- 
tain, to curb its rude, savage power, to soften its 
outlines, and bring fertility out of the elemental 
crudeness and barrenness. But time and the gentle 
rains of heaven will do it, as they have done it in the 
East, and as they are fast doing it in the West. 

An old guide with whom I talked, who had lived 
in and about the canon for twenty-six years, said, 
"While we have been sitting here, the canon has 
widened and deepened"; which was, of course, 
the literal truth, the mathematical truth, but the 
widening and deepening could not have been appre- 
hended by human sense. 

Our little span of human life is far too narrow for 
us to be a witness of any of the great earth changes. 
These changes are so slow, — oh, so slow, — and hu- 
man history is so brief. So far as we are concerned, 
the gods of the earth sit in council behind closed 

59 



TIME AND CHANGE 

doors. All the profound, formative, world-shaping 
forces of nature go on in a realm that we can reach 
only through our imaginations. They so far tran- 
scend our human experiences that it requires an act 
of faith to apprehend them. The repose of the hills 
and the mountains, how profound! yet they may be 
rising or sinking before our very eyes, and we detect 
no sign. Only on exceptional occasions, during earth- 
quakes or volcanic eruptions, is their dreamless 
slumber rudely disturbed. 

Geologists tell us that from the great plateau in 
which the Grand Canon is cut, layers of rock many 
thousands of feet thick were cut away before the 
canon was begun. 

Starting from the high plateau of Utah, and going 
south toward the canon, we descend a grand geo- 
logic stairway, every shelf or tread of which consists 
of different formations fifty or more miles broad, 
from the Eocene, at an altitude of over ten thousand 
feet at the start, across the Cretaceous, the Juras- 
sic, the Triassic, the Permian, to the Carboniferous, 
which is the bottom or landing of the Grand Caiion 
plateau at an altitude of about five thousand feet. 
Each step terminates more or less abruptly, the first 
by a drop of eight hundred feet, ornamented by 
rows of square obelisks and pilasters of uniform pat- 
tern and dimension, "giving the effect," says Major 
Dutton, "of a gigantic colonnade from which the 
entablature has been removed or has fallen in ruins." 

60 



THE DIVINE ABYSS 

The next step, or platform, the Cretaceous, slopes 
down gradually or dies out on the step beneath it; 
then comes the Jurassic, which ends in white sand- 
stone cliffs several hundred feet high; then the 
Triassic, which ends in the famous vermilion cliffs 
thousands of feet high, most striking in color and in 
form; then the Permian tread, which also ends 
in striking cliffs, with their own style of color and 
architecture; and, lastly, the great Carboniferous 
platform in which the canon itself is carved. Now, 
all these various strata above the canon, making 
at one time a thickness of over a mile, were worn 
away in Pliocene times, before the cutting of the 
Grand Canon began. Had they remained, and been 
cut through, we should have had a chasm two miles 
deep instead of one mile. 

The cutting power of a large, rapid volume of 
water, like the Colorado, charged with sand and 
gravel, is very great. According to Major Dutton, 
in the hydraulic mines of California, the escaping 
water has been known to cut a chasm from twelve 
to twenty feet deep in hard basaltic rock, in a single 
year. This is, of course, exceptional, but there have, 
no doubt, been times when the Colorado cut down- 
ward very rapidly. The enormous weathering of its 
side walls is to me the more wonderful, probably 
because the forces that have achieved this task are 
silent and invisible, and, so far as our experience 
goes, so infinitely slow in their action. 

61 



TIME AND CHANGE 

The river is a tremendous machine for grinding 
and sawing and transporting, but the rains and the 
frost and the air and the sunbeams smite the rocks 
as with weapons of down, and one is naturally in- 
credulous as to their destructive effects. 

Some of the smaller rivers in the plateau region 
flow in very deep but very narrow canons. The 
rocks being harder and more homogeneous, the 
weathering has been slight. The meteoric forces 
have not taken a hand in the game. Thus the Parun- 
uweap Caiion is only twenty to thirty feet wide, but 
from six hundred to fifteen hundred feet deep. 

I suppose the slow, inappreciable erosion to which 
the old guide alluded would have cut the caiion since 
Middle Tertiary times. The river, eating downward 
at the rate of one sixteenth of an inch a year, would 
do it in about one million years. At half that rate it 
would do it in double that time. In the earlier part 
of its history, when the rainfall was doubtless 
greater, and the river fuller, the erosion must have 
been much more rapid than it is at present. The 
widening of the canon was doubtless a slower process 
than the downward cutting. But, as I have said, 
the downward cutting would tend to check itself 
from age to age, while the widening process would 
go steadily forward. Hence, when we look into 
the great abyss, we have only to remember the 
enormous length of time that the aerial and sub- 
aerial forces have been at work to account for it. 



THE DIVINE ABYSS 

Two forces, or kinds of forces, have worked to- 
gether in excavating the canon: the river, which is 
the primary factor, and the meteoric forces, which 
may be called the secondary, as they follow in the 
wake of the former. The river starts the gash down- 
ward, then the aerial forces begin to eat into the 
sides. Acting alone, the river would cut a trench its 
own width, and were the rocks through which it saws 
one homogeneous mass, or of uniform texture and 
hardness, the width of the trench would probably 
have been very uniform and much less than it is 
now. The condition that has contributed to its 
great width is the heterogeneity of the different 
formations — some hard and some soft. The softer 
bands, of course, introduce the element of weakness. 
They decay and crumble the more rapidly, and thus 
undermine the harder bands overlying them, which, 
by reason of their vertical fractures, break off and 
fall to the bottom, where they are exposed to the 
action of floods and are sooner or later ground up 
in the river's powerful maw. Hence the recession of 
the banks of the canon has gone steadily on with the 
downward cutting of the river. Where the rock is 
homogeneous, as it is in the inner chasm of the dark 
gneiss, the widening process seems to have gone on 
much more slowly. Geologists account for the great 
width of the main chasm when compared with the 
depth, on the theory that the forces that work later- 
ally have been more continuously active than has 

63 



TIME AND CHANGE 

the force that cuts downward. There is convincing 
evidence that the whole region has been many times 
lifted up since the cutting began, so that the river 
has had its active and passive stages. As its channel 
approached the sea level, its current would be much 
less rapid, and the downward cutting would prac- 
tically cease, till the section was elevated again. But 
all the time the forces working laterally would be at 
work without interruption, and would thus gain on 
their checked brethren of the river bottom. 

There is probably another explanation of what we 
see here. Apart from the mechanical weathering of 
the rocks as a result of the arid climate, wherein 
rapid and often extreme changes of temperature 
take place, causing the surface of the rocks to flake 
or scale off, there has doubtless been unusual chem- 
ical weathering, and this has been largely brought 
about by the element of iron that all these rocks 
possess. Their many brilliant colors are imparted 
to them by the various compounds of iron which 
enter into their composition. And iron, though the 
symbol of hardness and strength, is an element of 
weakness in rocks, as it causes them to oxidize or 
disintegrate more rapidly. In the marble canon, 
where apparently the rock contains no iron, the 
lateral erosion has been very little, though the river 
has cut a trench as deep as it has in other parts of its 
course. 

How often I thought during those days at the 
64 



THE DIVINE ABYSS 

canon of the geology of my native hills amid the 
Catskills, which show the effects of denudation as 
much older than that shown here as this is olderthan 
the washout in the road by this morning's shower! 
The old red sandstone in which I hoed corn as a 
farm-boy dates back to Middle Palaeozoic time, or to 
the spring of the great geologic year, while the canon 
is of the late autumn. Could my native hills have 
replied to my mute questionings, they would have 
said: "We were old, old, and had passed through the 
canon stage long before the Grand Canon was bom. 
We have had all that experience, and have forgot- 
ten it ages ago. No vestiges of our canons remain. 
They have all been worn down and obliterated by 
the strokes of a hand as gentle as that of a passing 
cloud. Where they were, are now broad, fertile 
valleys, with rounded knolls and gentle slopes, and 
the sound of peaceful husbandry. The great ice 
sheet rubbed us and ploughed us, but our contours 
were gentle and rounded seons before that event. 
When the Grand Canon is as old as we are, all its 
superb architectural features will have long since 
disappeared, its gigantic walls will have crumbled, 
and rolling plains and gentle valleys will have taken 
its place." All of which seems quite probable. With 
time enough, the gentle forces of air and water will 
surely change the whole aspect of this tremendous 
chasm. 
On the second day we made the descent into the 
65 



TIME AND CHANGE 

canon on mule-back. There is always satisfaction 
in going to the bottom of things. Then we wanted 
to get on more intimate terms with the great 
abyss, to wrestle with it, if need be, and to feel its 
power, as well as to behold it. It is not best always 
to dwell upon the rim of things or to look down upon 
them from afar. The summits are good, but the 
valleys have their charm, also; even the valley of 
humiliation has its lessons. At any rate, four of us 
were unanimous in our desire to sound that vast 
profound on mule-back, trusting that the return 
trip would satisfy our "climbing" aspirations, as 
it did. 

It is quite worth while to go down into the canon 
on mule-back, if only to fall in love with a mule, and 
to learn what a sure-footed, careful, and docile 
creature, when he is on his good behavior, a mule 
can be. My mule was named "Johnny," and there 
was soon a good understanding between us. I 
quickly learned to turn the whole problem of that 
perilous descent over to him. He knew how to take 
the sharp turns and narrow shelves of that steep 
zigzag much better than I did. I do not fancy that 
the thought of my safety was "Johnny's" guiding 
star; his solicitude struck nearer home than that. 
There was much ice and snow on the upper part of 
the trail, and only those slender little legs of "John- 
ny's" stood between me and a tumble of two or 
three thousand feet. How cautiously he felt his 

66 



THE DIVINE ABYSS 

way with his round little feet, as, with lowered 
head, he seemed to be scanning the trail critically! 
Only when he swung around the sharp elbows of 
the trail did his forefeet come near the edge of the 
brink. Only once or twice at such times, as we hung 
for a breath above the terrible incline, did I feel a 
slight shudder. One of my companions, who had 
never before been upon an animal's back, so fell in 
love with her "Sandy" that she longed for a trunk 
big enough in which to take him home with her. 

It was more than worth while to make the de- 
scent to traverse that Cambrian plateau, which 
from the rim is seen to flow out from the base of the 
enormous cliffs to the brink of the inner chasm, look- 
ing like some soft, lavender-colored carpet or rug. 
I had never seen the Cambrian rocks, the lowest of 
the stratified formations, nor set my foot upon Cam- 
brian soil. Hence a new experience was promised 
me. Rocky layers probably two or three miles thick 
had been worn away from the old Cambrian foun- 
dations, and when I looked down upon that gently 
undulating plateau, the thought of the eternity of 
time which it represented tended quite as much to 
make me dizzy as did the drop of nearly four thou- 
sand feet. We found it gravelly and desert-like, cov- 
ered with cacti, low sagebrush, and other growths. 
The dim trail led us to its edge, where we could look 
down into the twelve-hundred-foot V-shaped gash 
which the river had cut into the dark, crude-looking 

67 



TIME AND CHANGE 

Archaean rock. How distinctly it looked like a new 
day in creation where the horizontal, yellowish-gray 
beds of the Cambrian were laid down upon the dark, 
amorphous, and twisted older granite! How care- 
fully the level strata had been fitted to the shapeless 
mass beneath it! It all looked like the work of a 
master mason; apparently you could put the point 
of your knife where one ended and the other began. 
The older rock suggested chaos and turmoil; the 
other suggested order and plan, as if the builder had 
said, "Now upon this foundation we will build our 
house." It is an interesting fact, the full geologic 
significance of which I suppose I do not appreciate, 
that the different formations are usually marked off 
from one another in just this sharp way, as if each 
one was, indeed, the work of a separate day of crea- 
tion. Nature appears at long intervals to turn over a 
new leaf and start a new chapter in her great book. 
The transition from one geologic age to another 
appears to be abrupt: new colors, new constituents, 
new qualities appear in the rocks with a suddenness 
hard to reconcile with LyelPs doctrine of uniform- 
itarianism, just as new species appear in the life of 
the globe with an abruptness hard to reconcile with 
Darwin's slow process of natural selection. Is sudden 
mutation, after all, the key to all these phenomena? 
We ate our lunch on the old Cambrian table, 
placed there for us so long ago, and gazed down 
upon the turbulent river hiding and reappearing in 

68 



THE DIVINE ABYSS 

its labyrinthian channel so far below us. It is worth 
while to make the descent in order to look upon the 
river which has been the chief quarryman in ex- 
cavating the canon, and to find how inadequate it 
looks for the work ascribed to it. Viewed from where 
we sat, I judged it to be forty or fifty feet broad, but 
I was assured that it was between two and three 
hundred feet. Water and sand are ever symbols 
of instability and inconstancy, but let them work 
together, and they saw through mountains, and 
undermine the foundations of the hills. 

It is always worth while to sit or kneel at the feet 
of grandeur, to look up into the placid faces of the 
earth gods and feel their power, and the tourist 
who goes down into the canon certainly has this 
privilege. We did not bring back in our hands, or in 
our hats, the glory that had lured us from the top, 
but we seemed to have been nearer its sources, and 
to have brought back a deepened sense of the mag- 
nitude of the forms, and of the depth of the chasm 
which we had heretofore gazed upon from a distance. 
Also we had plucked the flower of safety from the 
nettle danger, always an exhilarating enterprise. 

In climbing back, my eye, now sharpened by my 
geologic reading, dwelt frequently and long upon 
the horizon where that cross-bedded Carboniferous 
sandstone joins the Carboniferous limestone above 
it. How much older the sandstone looked ! I could 
not avoid the impression that its surface must have 

69 



TIME AND CHANGE 

formed a plane of erosion ages and ages before the 
limestone had been laid down upon it. 

We had left plenty of ice and snow at the top, but 
in the bottom we found the early spring flowers 
blooming, and a settler at what is called the In- 
dian Gardens was planting his garden. Here I heard 
the song of the canon wren, a new and very pleasing 
bird-song to me. I think our dreams were somewhat 
disturbed that night by the impressions of the day, 
but our day-dreams since that time have at least 
been sweeter and more comforting, and I am sure 
that the remainder of our lives will be the richer for 
our having seen the Grand Canon. 



Ill 

THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE 



YOSEMITE won my heart at once, as it seems 
to win the hearts of all who visit it. In my 
case many things helped to do it, but I am sure a 
robin, the first I had seen since leaving home, did 
his part. He struck the right note, he brought the 
scene home to me, he supplied the link of association. 
There he was, running over the grass or perching 
on the fence, or singing from a tree-top in the old 
familiar way. Where the robin is at home, there at 
home am I. But many other things helped to win 
my heart to the Yosemite — the whole character of 
the scene, not only its beauty and sublimity, but the 
air of peace and protection, and of homelike seclu- 
sion that pervades it; the charm of a nook, a retreat, 
combined with the power and grandeur of nature 
in her sternest moods. 

After passing from the hotel at El Portal along 
the foaming and roaring Merced River, and amid 
the tumbled confusion of enormous granite bould- 
ers shaken down from the cliffs above, you cross the 
threshold of the great valley as into some vast house 
or hall carved out of the mountains, and at once feel 

71 



TIME AND CHANGE 

the spell of the brooding calm and sheltered seclu- 
sion that pervades it. You pass suddenly from the 
tumultuous, the chaotic, into the ordered, the tran- 
quil, the restful, which seems enhanced by the power 
and grandeur that encompass them about. You 
can hardly be prepared for the hush that suddenly 
falls upon the river and for the gentle rural and 
sylvan character of much that surrounds you; the 
peace of the fields, the seclusion of the woods, the 
privacy of sunny glades, the enchantment of falls 
and lucid waters, with a touch of human occupancy 
here and there — all this, set in that enormous 
granite frame, three or four thousand feet high, 
ornamented with domes and spires and peaks still 
higher, — it is all this that wins your heart and fills 
your imagination in the Yosemite. 

As you ride or walk along the winding road up the 
level valley amid the noble pines and spruces and 
oaks, and past the groves and bits of meadow and 
the camps of many tents, and the huge mossy gran- 
ite boulders here and there reposing in the shade of 
the trees, with the full, clear, silent river winding 
through the plain near you, you are all the time 
aware of those huge vertical walls, their faces scarred 
and niched, streaked with color, or glistening with 
moisture, and animated with waterfalls, rising up 
on either hand, thousands of feet high, not archi- 
tectural, or like something builded, but like the sides 
and the four corners of the globe itself. What an 

72 



THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE 

impression of mass and of power and of grandeur in 
repose filters into you as you walk along! El Capi- 
tan stands there showing its simple sweeping lines 
through the trees as you approach, like one of the 
veritable pillars of the firmament. How long we are 
nearing it and passing it! It is so colossal that it 
seems near while it is yet far off. It is so simple that 
the eye takes in its naked grandeur at a glance. It 
demands of you a new standard of size which you 
cannot at once produce. It is as clean and smooth 
as the flank of a horse, and as poised and calm as 
a Greek statue. It curves out toward the base as if 
planted there to resist the pressure of worlds — 
probably the most majestic single granite column 
or mountain buttress on the earth. Its summit is 
over three thousand feet above you. Across the val- 
ley, nearly opposite, rise the Cathedral Rocks to 
nearly the same height, while farther along, beyond 
El Capitan, the Three Brothers shoulder the sky at 
about the same dizzy height. Near the head of the 
great valley, North Dome, perfect in outline as if 
turned in a lathe, and its brother, the Half Dome 
(or shall we say half-brother?) across the valley, 
look down upon Mirror Lake from an altitude of 
over four thousand feet. These domes suggest enor- 
mous granite bubbles if such were possible pushed 
up from below and retaining their forms through 
the vast geologic ages. Of course they must have 
weathered enormously, but as the rock seems to 

73 



TIME AND CHANGE 

peel off in concentric sheets, their forms are pre- 
served. 

ii 

One warm, bright Sunday near the end of April, 
six of us walked up from the hotel to Vernal and 
Nevada Falls, or as near to them as we could get, and 
took our fill of the tumult of foaming waters strug- 
gling with the wreck of huge granite cliffs : so impas- 
sive and immobile the rocks, so impetuous and reck- 
less and determined the onset of the waters, till the 
falls are reached, when the obstructed river seems 
to find the escape and the freedom it was so eagerly 
seeking. Better to be completely changed into foam 
and spray by one single leap of six hundred feet into 
empty space, the river seems to say, than be forever 
baffled and tortured and torn on this rack of merci- 
less boulders. 

We followed the zigzagging trail up the steep side 
of the valley, touching melting snow-banks in its 
upper courses, passing huge granite rocks also melt- 
ing in the slow heat of the geologic ages, pausing to 
take in the rugged, shaggy spruces and pines that 
sentineled the mountain-sides here and there, or 
resting our eyes upon Liberty Cap, which carries 
its suggestive form a thousand feet or more above 
the Nevada Fall. What beauty, what grandeur 
attended us that day! the wild tumult of waters, 
the snow-white falls, the motionless avalanches of 

74 



THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE 

granite rocks, and the naked granite shaft, Liberty 
Cap, dominating all ! 

And that night, too, when we sat around a big 
camp-fire near our tents in the valley, and saw the 
full moon come up and look down upon us from 
behind Sentinel Rock, and heard the intermittent 
booming of Yosemite Falls sifting through the 
spruce trees that towered around us, and felt the 
tender, brooding spirit of the great valley, itself 
touched to lyric intensity by the grandeurs on every 
hand, steal in upon us, and possess our souls — surely 
that was a night none of us can ever forget. As Yo- 
semite can stand the broad, searching light of mid- 
day and not be cheapened, so its enchantments can 
stand the light of the moon and the stars and not 
be rendered too vague and impalpable. 

in 

Going from the Grand Canon to Yosemite is 
going from one sublimity to another of a different 
order. The canon is the more strange, unearthly, 
apocryphal, appeals more to the imagination, and 
is the more overwhelming in its size, its wealth of 
color, and its multitude of suggestive forms. But for 
quiet majesty and beauty, with a touch of the sylvan 
and pastoral, too, Yosemite stands alone. One could 
live with Yosemite, camp in it, tramp in it, winter 
and summer in it, and find nature in her tender and 
human, almost domestic moods, as well as in he? 

75 



TIME AND CHANGE 

grand and austere. But I do not think one could 
ever feel at home in or near the Grand Canon; it is 
too unlike anything we have ever known upon the 
earth; it is like a vision of some strange colossal 
city uncovered from the depth of geologic time. You 
may have come to it, as we did, from the Petrified 
Forests, where you saw the silicified trunks of thou- 
sands of gigantic trees or tree ferns, that grew mil- 
lions of years ago, most of them uncovered, but 
many of them protruding from banks of clay and 
gravel, and in their interiors rich in all the colors of 
the rainbow, and you wonder if you may not now 
be gazing upon some petrified antediluvian city of 
temples and holy places exhumed by mysterious 
hands and opened up to the vulgar gaze of to-day. 
You look into it from above and from another world 
and you descend into it at your peril. Yosemite you 
enter as into a gigantic hall and make your own; the 
canon you gaze down upon, and are an alien, whether 
you enter it or not. Yosemite is carved out of the 
most majestic and enduring of all rocks, granite; the 
Grand Canon is carved out of one of the most beau- 
tiful, but perishable, red Carboniferous sandstone 
and limestone. There is a maze of beautiful and in- 
tricate lines in the latter, a wilderness of temple-like 
forms and monumental remains, and noble archi- 
tectural profiles that delight while they bewilder the 
eye. Yosemite has much greater simplicity, and is 
much nearer the classic standard of beauty. Its 

76 



THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE 

grand and austere features predominate, of course, 
but underneath these and adorning them are many 
touches of the idyllic and the picturesque. Its many 
waterfalls fluttering like white lace against its verti- 
cal granite walls, its smooth, level floor, its noble 
pines and oaks, its open glades, its sheltering groves, 
its bright, clear, winding river, its soft voice of many 
waters, its flowers, its birds, its grass, its verdure, 
even its orchards of blooming apple trees, all in- 
closed in this tremendous granite frame — what an 
unforgettable picture it all makes, what a blending 
of the sublime and the homelike and familiar it all 
is ! It is the waterfalls that make the granite alive, 
and bursting into bloom as it were. What a touch 
they give ! how they enliven the scene ! What music 
they evoke from these harps of stone! 

The first leap of Yosemite Falls is sixteen hun- 
dred feet — sixteen hundred feet of a compact mass 
of snowy rockets shooting downward and bursting 
into spray around which rainbows flit and hover. 
The next leap is four hundred feet, and the last 
six hundred. We tried to get near the foot and in- 
spect the hidden recess in which this airy spirit 
again took on a more tangible form of still, run- 
ning water, but the spray over a large area fell like a 
summer shower, drenching the trees and the rocks, 
and holding the inquisitive tourist off at a safe 
distance. We had to beat a retreat with dripping 
garments before we had got within fifty yards of the 

77 



TIME AND CHANGE 

foot of the fall. At first I was surprised at the vol- 
ume of water that came hurrying out of the hidden 
recess of dripping rocks and trees — a swiftly flow- 
ing stream, thirty or forty feet wide, and four or 
five feet deep. How could that comparatively nar- 
row curtain of white spray up there give birth to 
such a full robust stream? But I saw that in making 
the tremendous leap from the top of the precipice, 
the stream was suddenly drawn out, as we stretch 
a rubber band in our hands, and that the solid and 
massive current below was like the rubber again re- 
laxed. The strain was over, and the united waters 
deepened and slowed up over their rocky bed. 

Yosemite for a home or a camp, the Grand Canon 
for a spectacle. I have spoken of the robin I saw 
in Yosemite Valley. Think how forlorn and out of 
place a robin would seem in the Grand Canon! 
What would he do there? There is no turf for him 
to inspect, and there are no trees for him to perch 
on. I should as soon expect to find him amid the 
pyramids of Egypt, or amid the ruins of Karnak. 
The bluebird was in the Yosemite also, and the 
water-ouzel haunted the lucid waters. 

I noticed a peculiarity of the oak in Yosemite that 
I never saw elsewhere 1 — a fluid or outflowing condi- 
tion of the growth aboveground, such as one usually 
sees in the roots of trees — so that it tended to en- 

1 I have since observed the same trait in the oaks in Georgia 
— probably a characteristic of this tree in southern latitudes. 

78 



THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE 

velop and swallow, as it were, any solid object with 
which it came in contact. If its trunk touched a 
point of rock, it would put out great oaken lips 
several inches in extent as if to draw the rock into 
its maw. If a dry limb was cut or broken off, a foot 
from the trunk, these thin oaken lips would slowly 
creep out and envelop it — a sort of Western omni- 
vorous trait appearing in the trees. 

Whitman refers to "the slumbering and liquid 
trees." These Yosemite oaks recall his expression 
more surely than any of our Eastern trees. 

The reader may create for himself a good image 
of Yosemite by thinking of a section of seven or 
eight miles of the Hudson River, midway of its 
course, as emptied of its water and deepened three 
thousand feet or more, having the sides nearly ver- 
tical, with snow-white waterfalls fluttering against 
them here and there, the famous spires and domes 
planted along the rim, and the landscape of groves 
and glades, with its still, clear winding river, occupy- 
ing the bottom. 

IV 

One cannot look upon Yosemite or walk beneath 
its towering walls without the question arising in 
his mind, How did all this happen? What were the 
agents that brought it about? There has been a great 
geologic drama enacted here; who or what were the 
star actors? There are two other valleys in this part 
of the Sierra, Hetch-Hetchy and King's River, that 

79 



TIME AND CHANGE 

are almost identical in their main features, though 
the Merced Yosemite is the widest of the three. 
Each of them is a tremendous chasm in the granite 
rock, with nearly vertical walls, domes, El Capitans, 
and Sentinel and Cathedral Rocks, and waterfalls 
— all modeled on the same general plan. I believe 
there is nothing just like this trio of Yosemites any- 
where else on the globe. 

Guided by one's ordinary sense or judgment alone, 
one's judgment as developed and disciplined by the 
everyday affairs of life and the everyday course 
of nature, one would say on beholding Yosemite 
that here is the work of exceptional and extraor- 
dinary agents or world-building forces. It is as sur- 
prising and exceptional as would be a cathedral in 
a village street, or a gigantic sequoia in a grove of 
our balsam firs. The approach to it up the Merced 
River does not prepare one for any such astonishing 
spectacle as awaits one. The rushing, foaming 
water amid the tumbled confusion of huge granite 
rocks and the open V-shaped valley, are nothing 
very remarkable or unusual. Then suddenly you are 
on the threshold of this hall of the elder gods. De- 
mons and furies might lurk in the valley below, but 
here is the abode of the serene, beneficent Olympian 
deities. All is so calm, so hushed, so friendly, yet so 
towering, so stupendous, so unspeakably beautiful. 
You are in a mansion carved out of the granite 
foundations of the earth, with walls two or three 

80 



THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE 

thousand feet high, hung here and there with snow- 
white waterfalls, and supporting the blue sky on 
domes and pinnacles still higher. Oh, the calmness 
and majesty of the scene! the evidence of such tre- 
mendous activity of some force, some agent, and 
now so tranquil, so sheltering, so beneficent! 

That there should be two or three Yosemites in 
the Sierra not very far apart, all with the main fea- 
tures singularly alike, is very significant — as if this 
kind of valley was latent in the granite of that region 
— some peculiarity of rock structure that lends 
itself readily to these formations. The Sierra lies 
beyond the southern limit of the great continental 
ice-sheet of late Tertiary times, but it nursed and 
reared many local glaciers, and to the eroding power 
of these its Yosemites are partly due. But water was 
at work here long before the ice — eating down into 
the granite and laying open the mountain for the 
ice to begin its work. Ice may come, and ice may 
go, says the river, but I go on forever. Water tends 
to make a V-shaped valley, ice a U-shaped one, 
though in the Hawaiian Islands, where water erosion 
alone has taken place, the prevailing form of the 
valleys is that of the U-shaped. Yosemite approxi- 
mates to this shape, and ice has certainly played a 
part in its formation. But the glacier seems to have 
stopped at the outlet of the great valley; it did not 
travel beyond the gigantic hall it had helped to ex- 
cavate. The valley of the Merced from the mouth 

81 



TIME AND CHANGE 

of Yosemite downward is an open valley strewn 
with huge angular granite rocks and shows no signs 
of glaciation whatever. The reason of this abrupt- 
ness is quite beyond my ken. It is to me a plausible 
theory that when the granite that forms the Sierra 
was lifted or squeezed up by the shrinking of 
the earth, large fissures and crevasses may have 
occurred, and that Yosemite and kindred valleys 
may be the result of the action of water and ice in 
enlarging these original chasms. Little wonder that 
the earlier geologists, such as Whitney, were led to 
attribute the exceptional character of these valleys 
to exceptional and extraordinary agents — to sudden 
faulting or dislocation of the earth's crust. But 
geologists are becoming more and more loath to call 
in the cataclysmal to explain any feature of the topo- 
graphy of the land. Not to the thunder or the light- 
ning, to earthquake or volcano, to the forces of 
upheaval or dislocation, but to the still, small 
voice of the rain and the winds, of the frost and the 
snow, — the gentle forces now and here active all 
about us, carving the valleys and reducing the 
mountains, and changing the courses of rivers, — 
to these, as Lyell taught us, we are to look in nine 
cases out of ten, yes, in ninety-nine out of a hun- 
dred, to account for the configuration of the con- 
tinents. 

The geologists of our day, while not agreeing as 
to the amount of work done respectively by ice and 

82 



THE SPELL OF THE YOSEMITE 

water, yet agree that to the latter the larger propor- 
tion of the excavation is to be ascribed. At any rate 
between them both they have turned out one of the 
most beautiful and stupendous pieces of mountain 
carving to be found upon the earth. 



IV 

THROUGH THE EYES OF THE 
GEOLOGIST 



HOW habitually we go about over the surface 
of the earth, delving it or cultivating it or 
leveling it, without thinking that it has not always 
been as we now find it, that the mountains were not 
always mountains, nor the valleys always valleys, 
nor the plains always plains, nor the sand always 
sand, nor the clay always clay. Our experience goes 
but a little way in such matters. Such a thought 
takes us from human time to God's time, from the 
horizon of place and years to the horizon of geologic 
ages. We go about our little affairs in the world, 
sowing and reaping and building and journeying, 
like children playing through the halls of their an- 
cestors, without pausing to ask how these things all 
came about. We do not reflect upon the age of our 
fields any more than we do upon the size of the globe 
under our feet : when we become curious about such 
matters and look upon the mountains as either old 
or young, or as the subjects of birth, growth, and 
decay, then we are unconscious geologists. It is to 
our interest in such things that geology appeals and 
it is this interest that it stimulates and guides. 

85 



TIME AND CHANGE 

What an astonishing revelation, for instance, that 
the soil was born of the rocks, and is still born of the 
rocks; that every particle of it was once locked up 
in the primitive granite and was unlocked by the 
slow action of the rain and the dews and the snows; 
that the rocky ribs of the earth were clothed with 
this fertile soil out of which we came and to which 
we return by their own decay; that the pulling-down 
of the inorganic meant the building-up of the organic ; 
that the death of the crystal meant the birth of the 
cell, and indirectly of you and me and of all that 
lives upon the earth. 

Had there been no soil, had the rocks not decayed, 
there had been no you and me. Such considerations 
have long made me feel a keen interest in geology, 
and especially of late years have stimulated my 
desire to try to see the earth as the geologist sees it. 
I have always had a good opinion of the ground 
underfoot, out of which we all come, and to which 
we all return; and the story the geologists tell us 
about it is calculated to enhance greatly that good 
opinion. 

I think that if I could be persuaded, as my fathers 
were, that the world was made in six days, by the 
fiat of a supernatural power, I should soon lose my 
interest in it. Such an account of it takes it out of 
the realm of human interest, because it takes it out 
of the realm of natural causation, and places it in the 
realm of the arbitrary, and non-natural. But to 

86 



THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST'S EYES 

know that it was not made at all, in the mechanical 
sense, but that it grew — that it is an evolution 
as much as the life upon the surface, that it has 
an almost infinite past, that it has been developing 
and ripening for millions upon millions of years, a 
veritable apple upon the great sidereal tree, amelio- 
rating from cycle to cycle, mellowing, coloring, 
sweetening — why, such a revelation adds im- 
mensely to our interest in it. 

As with nearly everything else, the wonder of the 
world grows the more we grasp its history. The 
wonder of life grows the more we consider the chaos 
of fire and death out of which it came; the wonder of 
man grows the more we peer into the abyss of geo- 
logic time and of low bestial life out of which he 
came. 

Not a tree, not a shrub, not a flower, not a green 
thing growing, not an insect of an hour, but has a 
background of a vast aeon of geologic and astro- 
nomic time, out of which the forces that shaped it 
have emerged, and over which the powers of chaos 
and darkness have failed to prevail. 

The modern geologist affords us one of the best 
illustrations of the uses of the scientific imagina- 
tion that we can turn to. The scientific imagination 
seems to be about the latest phase of the evolution 
of the human mind. This power of interpretation 
of concrete facts, this Miltonic flight into time and 
space, into the heavens above, and into the bowels 

87 



TIME AND CHANGE 

of the earth beneath, and bodying forth a veritable 
history, a warring of the powers of light and dark- 
ness, with the triumph of the angels of light and life, 
makes Milton's picture seem hollow and unreal. 
The creative and poetic imagination has undoubtedly 
already reached its high- water mark. We shall prob- 
ably never see the great imaginative works of the 
past surpassed or even equaled. But in the world of 
scientific discovery and interpretation, we see the 
imagination working in new fields and under new 
conditions, and achieving triumphs that mark a new 
epoch in the history of the race. Nature, which 
once terrified man and made a coward of him, now 
inspires him and fills him with love and enthusiasm. 

The geologist is the interpreter of the records of 
the rocks. From a bit of strata here, and a bit there, 
he re-creates the earth as it was in successive geo- 
logic periods, as Cuvier reconstructed his extinct 
animals from fragments of their bones; and the same 
interpretative power of the imagination is called 
into play in both cases, only the palaeontologist has 
a much narrower field to work in, and the back- 
ground of his re-creations must be supplied by the 
geologist. 

Everything connected with the history of the 
earth is on such a vast scale — such a scale of time, 
such a scale of power, such a scale of movement — 
that in trying to measure it by our human standards 
and experience we are like the proverbial child with 

88 



THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST'S EYES 

his cup on the seashore. Looked at from our point 
of view, the great geological processes often seem 
engaged in world-destruction rather than in world- 
building. Those oft-repeated invasions of the con- 
tinents by the ocean, which have gone on from 
Archaean times, and during which vast areas which 
had been dry land for ages were engulfed, seem like 
w r orld-wide catastrophes. And no doubt they were 
such to myriads of plants and animals of those 
times. But this is the way the continents grew. All 
the forces of the invading waters were engaged in 
making more land. 

The geologist is bold; he is made so by the facts 
and processes with which he deals; his daring affirm- 
ations are inspired by a study of the features of the 
earth about him; his time is not our time, his hori- 
zons are not our horizons ; he escapes from our human 
experiences and standards into the vast out-of-doors 
of the geologic forces and geologic ages. The text 
he deciphers is written large, written across the face 
of the continent, written in mountain-chains and 
ocean depths, and in the piled strata of the globe. 
We untrained observers cannot spell out these 
texts, because they are written large; our vision is 
adjusted to smaller print; we are like the school-boy 
who finds on the map the name of a town or a river, 
but does not see the name of the state or the con- 
tinent printed across it. If the geologist did not 
tell us, how should we ever suspect that probably 

89 



TIME AND CHANGE 

where we now stand two or more miles of strata have 
been worn away by the winds and rains; that the soil 
of our garden, our farm, represents the ashes of moun- 
tains burned up in the slow fires of the geologic ages. 

Geology first gives us an adequate conception of 
time. The limitations which shut our fathers into 
the narrow close of six thousand years are taken 
down by this great science and we are turned out 
into the open of unnumbered millions of years. Upon 
the background of geologic time our chronological 
time shows no more than a speck upon the sky. 
The whole of human history is but a mere fraction 
of a degree of this mighty arc. The Christian era 
would make but a few seconds of the vast cycle of 
the earth's history. Geologic time! The words seem 
to ring down through the rocky strata of the earth's 
crust; they reverberate under the mountains, and 
make them rise and fall like the waves of the sea; 
they open up vistas through which we behold the 
continents and the oceans changing places, and the 
climates of the globe shifting like clouds in the sky; 
whole races and tribes of animal forms disappear 
and new ones come upon the scene. Such a past! 
the imagination can barely skirt the edge of it. 
As the pool in the field is to the sea that wraps the 
earth, so is the time of our histories to the cycle of 
ages in which the geologist reckons the events 
of the earth's history. 

Through the eyes of the geologist one may look 
90 



THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST'S EYES 

upon his native hills and see them as they were in- 
calculable ages ago, and as they probably will be 
incalculable ages ahead; those hills, so unchanging 
during his lifetime, and during a thousand lifetimes, 
he may see as flitting as the cloud shadows upon the 
landscape. Out of the dark abyss of geologic time 
there come stalking the ghosts of lost mountains and 
lost hills and valleys and plains, or lost rivers and 
lakes, yea, of lost continents; we see a procession of 
the phantoms of strange and monstrous beasts, 
many of them colossal in size and fearful in form, 
and among the minor forms of this fearful troop of 
spectres we see the ones that carried safely forward, 
through the vicissitudes of those ages, the precious 
impulse that was to eventuate in the human race. 
Only the geologist knows the part played by ero- 
sion in shaping the earth's surface as we see it. He 
sees, I repeat, the phantoms of vanished hills and 
mountains all about us. He sees their shadow forms 
wherever he looks. He follows out the lines of the 
flexed or folded strata where they come to the sur- 
face, and thus sketches in the air the elevation that 
has disappeared. In some places he finds that the 
valleys have become hills and the hills have become 
valleys, or that the anticlines and synclines, as he 
calls them, have changed places — as a result of the 
unequal hardness of the rocks. Over all the older 
parts of the country the original features have been 
so changed by erosion that, could they be suddenly 

91 



TIME AND CHANGE 

restored, one would be lost on his home farm. The 
rocks have melted into soil, as the snow-banks in 
spring melt into water. The rocks that remain are 
like fragments of snow or ice that have so far with- 
stood the weather. Geologists tell us that the great 
Appalachian chain has been in the course of the 
ages reduced almost to a base level or peneplain, 
and then reelevated and its hills and mountains 
carved out anew. 

We change the surface of the earth a little with 
our engineering, drain a marsh, level a hill, sweep 
away a forest, or bore a mountain, but what are 
these compared with the changes that have gone on 
there before our race was heard of? In my native 
mountains, the Catskills, all those peaceful pastoral 
valleys, with their farms and homesteads, lie two 
or three thousand feet below the original surface 
of the land. Could the land be restored again to its 
first condition in Devonian times, probably the 
fields where I hoed corn and potatoes as a boy would 
be buried one or two miles beneath the rocks. 

The Catskills are residual mountains, or what 
Agassiz calls "denudation mountains." When we 
look at them with the eye of the geologist we see the 
great plateau of tableland of Devonian times out of 
which they were carved by the slow action of the 
sub-aerial forces. They are like the little ridges and 
mounds of soil that remain of your garden-patch 
after the waters of a cloudburst have swept over it. 

92 



THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST'S EYES 

They are immeasurably old, but they do not look 
it, except to the eye of the geologist. There is no- 
thing decrepit in their appearance, nothing broken, 
or angular, or gaunt, or rawboned. Their long, easy, 
flowing lines, their broad, smooth backs, their deep, 
wide, gently sloping valleys, all help to give them a 
look of repose and serenity, as if the fret and fever 
of life were long since passed with them. Compared 
with the newer mountains of uplift in the West, 
they are like cattle lying down and ruminating in 
the field beside alert wild steers with rigid limbs and 
tossing horns. They sleep and dream with bowed 
heads upon the landscape. Their great flanks and 
backs are covered with a deep soil that nourishes a 
very even growth of beech, birch, and maple forests. 
Though so old, their tranquillity never seems to 
have been disturbed; no storm-and-stress period 
has left its mark upon them. Their strata all lie 
horizontal just as they were laid down in the old 
seas, and nothing but the slow gentle passage of the 
hand of time shows in their contours. Mountains 
of peace and repose, hills and valleys with the flow- 
ing lines of youth, coming down to us from the fore- 
world of Palseozoic time, yet only rounded and mel- 
lowed by the aeons they have passed through. Old, 
oh, so old, but young with verdure and limpid 
streams, and the pastoral spirit of to-day ! 

To the geologist most mountains are short-lived. 
When he finds great sturdy ranges, like the Alps, 

93 



TIME AND CHANGE 

the Andes, the Himalayas, he knows they are young, 
— mere boys. When they get old, they will be cut 
down, and their pride and glory gone. A few more 
of these geologic years and they will be reduced to 
a peneplain, — only their stumps left. This seems 
to hold truer of mountains that are wrinkles in the 
earth's crust — squeezed up and crumpled strati- 
fied rock, such as most of the great mountain- 
systems are — than of mountains of erosion like 
the Catskills, or of upheaval like the Adirondacks. 
The crushed and folded and dislocated strata are 
laid open to the weather as the horizontal strata, 
and as the upheaved masses of Archaean rock are 
not. Moreover, strata of unequal hardness are ex- 
posed, and this condition favors rapid erosion. 

In imagination the geologist is present at the 
birth of whole mountain-ranges. He sees them ges- 
tating in the womb of their mother, the sea. Where 
our great Appalachian range now stands, he sees, 
in the great interior sea of Palaeozoic time, what he 
calls a "geosyncline," a vast trough, or cradle, being 
slowly filled with sediment brought down by the 
rivers from the adjoining shores. These sediments 
accumulate to the enormous depth of twenty-five 
thousand feet, and harden into rock. Then in the 
course of time they are squeezed together and forced 
up by the contraction of the earth's crust, and thus 
the Appalachians are born. When Mother Earth 
takes a new hitch in her belt, her rocky garment 

94 



THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST'S EYES 

takes on new wrinkles. Just why the earth's crust 
should wrinkle along lines of rock of such enormous 
thickness is not a little puzzling. But we are told it 
is because this heavy mass of sediment presses the 
sea-bottom down till the rocks are fused^by the in- 
ternal heat of the earth and thus a line of weakness 
is established. In any case the earth's forces act 
as a whole, and the earth's crust at the thickest 
points is so comparatively thin — probably not 
much more than a heavy sheet of cardboard over 
a six-inch globe — that these forces seem to go their 
own way regardless of such minor differences. 

The Alps and the Himalayas, much younger than 
our Appalachians, were also begotten and nursed in 
the cradle of a vast geosyncline in the Tertiary seas. 
We speak of the birth of a mountain-range in terms 
of a common human occurrence, or as if it were an 
event that might be witnessed, measurable in hu- 
man years or days, whereas it is an event measurable 
only in geologic periods* and geologic periods are 
marked off only on the dial-face of eternity. The 
old Hebrew writer gave but a faint image of it when 
he said that with the Lord a thousand years are as 
one day; it is hardly one hour of the slow beat of 
that clock whose hours mark the periods of the 
earth's development. 

The whole long period during which the race of 
man has been rushing about, tickling and scratch- 
ing and gashing the surface of the globe, would make 

95 



TIME AND CHANGE 

but a small fraction of one of the days that make up 
the periods with which the geologist deals. And the 
span of human life, how it dwindles to a point in the 
face of the records of the rocks ! Doubtless the birth 
of some of the mountain-systems of the globe is still 
going on, and we suspect it not; an elevation of one 
foot in a century would lift up the Sierra or the 
Rocky Mountains in a comparatively short geologic 
period. 

ii 

It was the geologist that emboldened Tennyson 
to sing, — 

"The hills are shadows and they flow 

From form to form and nothing stands, 
They melt like mists, the solid lands, 
Like clouds they shape themselves and go." 

But some hills flow much faster than others. Hills 
made up of the latest or newest formations seem to 
take to themselves wings the fastest. 

The Archsean hills and mountains, how slowly 
they melt away! In the Adirondacks, in northern 
New England, in the Highlands of the Hudson, they 
still hold their heads high and have something of the 
vigor of their prime. 

The most enduring rocks are the oldest; and the 
most perishable are, as a rule, the youngest. It takes 
time to season and harden the rocks, as it does men. 
Then the earlier rocks seem to have had better stuff 
in them. They are nearer the paternal granite; and 

96 



THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST'S EYES 

the primordial seas that mothered them were, no 
doubt, richer in the various mineral solutions that 
knitted and compacted the sedimentary deposits. 
The Cretaceous formations melt away almost like 
snow. I fancy that the ocean now, compared with 
the earlier condition when it must have been so 
saturated with mineral elements, is like thrice- 
skimmed milk. 

The geologist is not stinted for time. He deals with 
big figures. It is refreshing to see him dealing out his 
years so liberally. Do you want a million or two to 
account for this or that? You shall have it for the 
asking. He has an enormous balance in the bank 
of Time, and be draws upon it to suit his purpose. 
In human history a thousand years is a long time. 
Ten thousand years wipe out human history com- 
pletely. Ten thousand more, and we are probably 
among the rude cave-men or river-drift men. One 
hundred thousand, and we are — where? Probably 
among the simian ancestors of man. A million years, 
and we are probably in Eocene or Miocene times, 
among the huge and often grotesque mammals, and 
our ancestor, a little creature, probably of the 
marsupial kind, is skulking about and hiding from 
the great carnivorous beasts that would devour him. 

"Little man, least of all, 
Among the legs of his guardians tall, 
Walked about with puzzled look. 
Him by the hand dear Nature took, 

97 



TIME AND CHANGE 

Dearest Nature, strong and kind, 
Whispered, ' Darling, never mind ! 
To-morrow they will wear another face, 
The founder thou; these are thy race! ' " 

I fancy Emerson would be surprised and probably 
displeased at the use I have made of his lines. I re- 
member once hearing him say that his teacher in 
such matters as I am here touching upon was Agas- 
siz, and not Darwin. Yet did he not write that 
audacious line about "the worm striving to be 
man"? And Nature certainly took his "little 
man" by the hand and led him forward, and on the 
morrow the rest of the animal creation "wore an- 
other face." 

in 

In my geological studies I have had a good deal 
of trouble with the sedimentary rocks, trying to 
trace their genealogy and getting them properly 
fathered and mothered. I do not think the geologists 
fully appreciate what a difficult problem the origin 
of these rocks presents to the lay mind. They bulk 
so large, while the mass of original crystalline rocks 
from which they are supposed to have been derived 
is so small in comparison. In the case of our own 
continent we have, to begin with, about two million 
of square miles of Archsean rocks in detached lines 
and masses, rising here and there above the prim- 
ordial ocean; a large triangular mass in Canada, 
and two broken lines of smaller masses running 



THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST'S EYES 

south from it on each side of the continent, inclosing 
a vast interior sea between them. To end with, we 
have the finished continent of eight million or more 
square miles, of an average height of two thousand 
feet above the sea, built up or developed from and 
around these granite centres very much as the body 
is built up and around the bones, and of such pro- 
digious weight that some of our later geologists seek 
to account for the continental submarine shelf that 
surrounds the continent on the theory that the land 
has slowly crept out into the sea under the pressure 
of its own weight. And all this, — to say nothing 
of the vast amount of rock, in some places a mile 
or two in thickness, that has been eroded from the 
land surfaces of the globe in later geological time, and 
now lies buried in the seas and lakes, — we are told, 
is the contribution of those detached portions of 
Archaean rock that first rose above the primordial 
seas. It is a greater miracle than that of the loaves 
and the fishes. We have vastly more to end with 
than we had to begin with. The more the rocks have 
been destroyed, the more they have increased; the 
more the waters have devoured them, the more they 
have multiplied and waxed strong. 

Either the geologists have greatly underestimated 
the amount of Archaean rock above the waters at the 
start, or else there are factors in the problem that 
have not been taken into the account. Lyell seems 
to have appreciated the difficulties of the problem, 

99 



TIME AND CHANGE 

and, to account for the forty thousand feet of sedi- 
ment deposited in Palaeozoic times in the region 
of the Appalachians, he presupposes a neighboring 
continent to the east, probably formed of Lauren- 
tian rocks, where now rolls the Atlantic. But if 
such a continent once existed, would not some ves- 
tige of it still remain? The fact that no trace of it 
has been found, it seems to me, invalidates Lyell's 
theory. 

Archaean time in geologic history answers to pre- 
historic time in human history; all is dark and uncer- 
tain, though we are probably safe in assuming that 
there was more strife and turmoil among the earth- 
building forces than there has ever been since. The 
body of unstratified rock within the limits of North 
America may have been much greater than is sup- 
posed, but it seems to me impossible that it could 
have been anything like as massive as the continent 
now is. If this had been the case there would have 
been no great interior sea, and no wide sea-margins 
in which the sediments of the stratified rocks could 
have been deposited. More than four fifths of the 
continent is of secondary origin and shows that vast 
geologic eras went to the making of it. 

It is equally hard to believe that the primary or 
igneous rocks, where they did appear, were suffi- 
ciently elevated to have furnished through erosion 
the all but incalculable amount of material that 
went to the making of our vast land areas. But 

100 



THROUGH THE GEOLOGISTS EYES 

the geologists give me the impression that this is 
what we are to believe. 

Chamberlin and Salisbury, in their recent col- 
lege geology, teach that each new formation implies 
the destruction of an equivalent amount of older 
rock — every system being entirely built up out of 
the older one beneath it. Lyell and Dana teach the 
same thing. If this were true, could there have been 
any continental growth at all? Could a city grow 
by the process of pulling down the old buildings for 
material to build the new? If the geology is correct, 
I fail to see how there would be any more land sur- 
face to-day then there was in Archaean times. Each 
new formation would only have replaced the old 
from which it came. The Silurian would only have 
made good the waste of the Cambrian, and the De- 
vonian made good the waste of the Silurian, and so 
on to the top of the series, and in the end we should 
still have been at the foot of the stairs. That vast 
interior sea that in Archaean times stretched from 
the rudimentary Appalachian Mountains to the 
rudimentary Rocky Mountains, and which is now 
the heart of the continent, would still have been a 
part of the primordial ocean. But instead of that, 
this sea is filled and piled up with sedimentary rocks 
thousands of feet thick, that have given birth on 
their surfaces to thousands of square miles of as 
fertile soil as the earth holds. 

That the original crystalline rocks played the 
101 



TIME AND CHANGE 

major part in the genealogy of the subsequent strati- 
fied rocks, it would be folly to deny. But it seems to 
me that chemical and cosmic processes, working 
through the air and the water, have contributed 
more than they have been credited with. 

It looks as if in all cases when the soil is carried 
to the sea-bottom as sediment, and again, during 
the course of ages, consolidated into rocks, the 
rocks thus formed have exceeded in bulk the rocks 
that gave them birth. Something analogous to 
vital growth takes place. It seems as if the original 
granite centres set the world-building forces at 
work. They served as nuclei around which the 
materials gathered. These rocks bred other rocks, 
and these still others, and yet others, till the frame- 
work of the land was fairly established. They were 
like the pioneer settlers who plant homes here and 
there in the wilderness, and then in due time all the 
land is peopled. 

The granite is the Adam rock, and through a long 
line of descent the major part of all the other rocks 
directly or indirectly may be traced. Thus the gran- 
ite begot the Algonquin, the Algonquin begot the 
Cambrian, the Cambrian begot the Silurian, the 
Silurian begot the Devonian, and so on up through 
the Carboniferous, the Permian, the Mesozoic rocks, 
the Tertiary rocks, to the latest Quaternary de- 
posit. But the curious thing about it all is the enor- 
mous progeny from so small a beginning; the rocks 

102 



THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST'S EYES 

seem really to have grown and multiplied like or- 
ganic beings; the seed of the granite seems to have 
fertilized the whole world of waters, and in due time 
they brought forth this huge family of stratified 
rocks. There stands the Archaean Adam, his head 
and chest in Canada, his two unequal legs running, 
one down the Pacific coast, and one down the At- 
lantic Coast, and from his loins, we are told, all the 
progeny of rocks and soils that make up the conti- 
nent have sprung, one generation succeeding an- 
other in regular order. His latest offspring is in the 
South and Southwest, and in the interior. These 
are the new countries, geologically speaking, as well 
as humanly speaking. 

The great interior sea, epicontinental, the geolo- 
gists call it, seems to have been fermenting and 
laboring for untold aeons in building up these parts 
of the continent. In the older Eastern States we find 
the sons and grandsons of the old Adam granite; but 
in the South and West we find his offspring of the 
twentieth or twenty-fifth generation, and so unlike 
their forebears; the Permian rocks, for instance, and 
the Cretaceous rocks, are soft and unenduring, for 
the most part. The later slates, too, are degener- 
ates, and much of the sandstones have the hearts of 
prodigals. In the Bad Lands of Arizona I could have 
cut my way into some of the Eocene formations 
with my pocket-knife. Apparently the farther away 
we get from the parent granite, the more easily is 

103 



TIME AND CHANGE 

the rock eroded. Nearly all the wonderful and beau- 
tiful sculpturing of the rocks in the West and South- 
west is in rocks of comparatively recent date. 

Can we say that all the organic matter of our 
time is from preexisting organic matter? one or- 
ganism torn down to build up another? that the be- 
ginning of the series was as great as the end? There 
may have been as much matter in a state of vital 
organization in Carboniferous or in Cretaceous times 
as in our own, but there is certainly more now than 
in early Palaeozoic times. Yet every grain of this 
matter has existed somewhere in some form for all 
time. Or we might ask if all the wealth of our day 
is from preexisting wealth — one fortune pulled 
down to build up another, — too often the case, 
it is true, — thus passing the accumulated wealth 
along from one generation to another. On the con- 
trary, has there not been a steady gain of that we 
call wealth through the ingenuity and the industry 
of man directed towards the latent wealth of the 
earth? In a parallel manner has there been a gain 
in the bulk of the secondary rocks through the ac- 
tion of the world-building forces directed to the sea, 
the air, and the preexisting rocks. Had there been 
no gain, the fact would suggest the ill luck of a man 
investing his capital in business and turning it over 
and over, and having no more money at the end than 
he had in the beginning. 

Nothing is in the sedimentary rock that was not 
104 



THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST'S EYES 

at one time in the original granite, or in the primor- 
dial seas, or in the primordial atmosphere, or in 
the heavens above, or in the interior of the earth 
beneath. We must sweep the heavens, strain the 
seas, and leach the air, to obtain all this material. 
Evidently the growth of these rocks has been mainly 
a chemical process — a chemical organization of 
preexisting material, as much so as the growth of 
a plant or a tree or an animal. The color and tex- 
ture and volume of each formation differ so radically 
from those of the one immediately before it as 
to suggest something more than a mere mechanical 
derivation of one from the other. New factors, 
new sources, are implied. "The farther we recede 
from the present time," says Lyell, "and the higher 
the antiquity of the formations which we exam- 
ine, the greater are the changes which the sedi- 
mentary deposits have undergone." Above all have 
chemical processes produced changes. This con- 
stant passage of the mineral elements of the rocks 
through the cycle of erosion, sedimentation, and re- 
induration has exposed them to the action of the 
air, the light, the sea, and has thus undoubtedly 
brought about a steady growth in their volume and 
a constant change in their color and texture. Marl 
and clay and green sand and salt and gypsum and 
shale, all have their genesis, all came down to us in 
some way or in some degree, from the aboriginal 
crystalline rocks; but what transformations and 

105 



TIME AND CHANGE 

transmutations they have undergone! They have 
passed through Nature's laboratory and taken on 
new forms and characteristics. 

"All sediments deposited in the sea/' says my 
geology, "undergo more or less chemical change," 
and many chemical changes involve notable changes 
in volume of the mineral matter concerned. It has 
been estimated that the conversion of granite rock 
into soil increases its volume eighty-eight per cent, 
largely as the result of hydration, or the taking up of 
water in the chemical union. The processes of oxid- 
ation and carbonation are also expansive processes. 
Whether any of this gain in volume is lost in the pro- 
cess of sedimentation and reconsolidation, I do not 
know. Probably all the elements that water takes 
from the rocks by solution, it returns to them when 
the disintegrated parts, in the form of sediment in the 
sea, is again converted into strata. It is in this cycle 
of rock disintegration and rock re-formation that 
the processes of life go on. Without the decay of the 
rock there could be no life on the land. Water and 
air are always the go-betweens of the organic and 
inorganic. After the rains have depleted the rocks 
of their soluble parts and carried them to the sea, 
they come back and aid vegetable life to unlock and 
appropriate other soluble parts, and thus build up 
the vegetable and, indirectly, the animal world. 

That the growth of the continents owes much to 
the denudation of the sea-bottom, brought about by 

106 



THROUGH THE GEOLOGISTS EYES 

the tides and the ocean-currents, which were prob- 
ably much more powerful in early than in late geo- 
logic times, and to submarine mineral springs and 
volcanic eruptions of ashes and mud, admits of little 
doubt. That it owes much to extra-terrestrial sources 
— to meteorites and meteoric dust — also admits 
of little doubt. 

It seems reasonable that earlier in the history of 
the evolution of our solar system there should have 
been much more meteoric matter drifting through 
the interplanetary spaces than during the later ages, 
and that a large amount of this matter should have 
found its way to the earth, in the form either of solids 
or of gases. Probably much more material has been 
contributed by volcanic eruptions than there is any 
evidence of apparent. The amount of mineral mat- 
ter held in solution by the primordial seas must have 
been enormous. The amount of rock laid down in 
Palaeozoic times is estimated at fifty thousand feet, 
and o£ this thirteen thousand feet were limestone; 
while the amount laid down in Mesozoic times, 
for aught we know a period quite as long, amounts to 
eight thousand feet, indicating, it seems to me, that 
the deposition of sediment went on much more rap- 
idly in early geologic times. We are nearer the begin- 
ning of things. All chemical processes in the earth's 
crust were probably more rapid. Doubtless the rain- 
fall was more, but the land areas must have been less. 
The greater amount of carbon dioxide in the air dur- 

107 



TIME AND CHANGE 

ing Palaeozoic times would have favored more rapid 
carbonation. When granite is dissolved by weather- 
ing, carbon unites with the potash, the soda, the 
lime, the magnesia, and the iron, and turns them 
into carbonates and swells their bulk. The one thing 
that is passed along from formation to formation un- 
changed is the quartz sand. Quartz is tough, and the 
sand we find to-day is practically the same that was 
dissolved out of the first crystalline rocks. 

Take out of the soil and out of the rocks all that 
they owe to the air, — the oxygen and the carbon, 
— and how would they dwindle! The limestone 
rocks would practically disappear. 

Probably not less that one fourth of all the sedi- 
mentary rocks are limestone, which is of animal 
origin. How much of the lime of which these rocks 
were built was leached out of the land-areas, and 
how much was held in solution by the original sea- 
water, is of course a question. But all the carbon 
they hold came out of the air. The waters of the 
primordial ocean were probably highly charged with 
mineral matter, with various chlorides and sulphates 
and carbonates, such as the sulphate of soda, the 
sulphate of lime, the sulphate of magnesia, the 
chloride of sodium, and the like. The chloride of 
sodium, or salt, remains, while most of the other 
compounds have been precipitated through the 
agency of minute forms of life, and now form parts 
of the soil and of the stratified rocks beneath it. 

108 



THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST'S EYES 

If the original granite is the father of the rocks, 
the sea is the mother. In her womb they were ges- 
tated and formed. Had not this seesaw of land 
and ocean taken place, there could have been no con- 
tinental growth. Every time the land took a bath 
in the sea, it came up enriched and augmented. Each 
new layer of rocky strata taken on showed a marked 
change in color and texture. It was a kind of evolu- 
tion from that which preceded it. Whether the land 
always went down, or whether the sea at times came 
up, by reason of some disturbance of the ocean floors 
in its abysmal depths, we have no means of knowing. 
In any case, most of the land has taken a sea bath 
many times, not all taking the plunge at the same 
time, but different parts going down in successive 
geologic ages. The original granite upheavals in 
British America, and in New York and New Eng- 
land, seem never to have taken this plunge, except 
an area about Lake Superior which geologists say 
has gone down four or five times. The Lauren- 
tian and Adirondack ranges have never been in 
pickle in the sea since they first saw the light. In 
most other parts of the continent, the seesaw be- 
tween the sea and the land has gone on steadily 
from the first, and has been the chief means of the 
upbuilding of the land. 

To the slow and oft-repeated labor-throes of the 
sea we owe the continents. But the sea devours her 
children. Large areas, probably continental in ex- 

109 



TIME AND CHANGE 

tent, have gone down and have not yet come up, if 
they ever will. The great Mississippi Valley was 
under water and above water time after time during 
the Palaeozoic period. The last great invasion of 
the land by the sea, and probably the greatest of all, 
seems to have been in Cretaceous times, at the end 
of the Mesozoic period. There were many minor in- 
vasions during Tertiary times, but none on so large 
a scale as this Cretaceous invasion. At this time a 
large part of North and South America, and of Eu- 
rope, and parts of Asia and Australia went under 
the ocean. It was as if the earth had exhaled her 
breath and let her abdomen fall. The sea united the 
Gulf of Mexico with the Arctic Ocean, and covered 
the Prairie and the Gulf States and came up over 
New Jersey to the foot of the Archaean Highlands. 
This great marine inundation probably took place 
several million years ago. It was this visitation of 
the sea that added the vast chalk beds to England 
and France. In parts of this country limestone beds 
five or six thousand feet thick were laid down, as well 
as extensive chalk beds. The earth seems to have 
taken another hitch in her girdle during this era. 
As the land went down, the mountains came up. 
Most of the great Western mountain-chains were 
formed during this movement, and the mountains of 
Mexico were pushed up. The Alps were still under 
the sea, but the Sierra and the Alleghanies were 
again lifted. 

110 



THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST'S EYES 

It is very interesting to me to know that in Colo- 
rado charred wood, and even charcoal, have been 
found in Cretaceous deposits. The fact seems to give 
a human touch to that long-gone time. It was, of 
course, long ages before the evolution of man, as 
man, had taken place, yet such is the power of as- 
sociation, that those charred sticks instantly call 
him to mind, as if we had come upon the place of his 
last campfire. At any rate, it is something to know 
that man, when he did come, did not have to dis- 
cover or invent fire, but that this element, which has 
played such a large part in his development and 
civilization, was here before him, waiting, like so 
many other things in nature, to be his servant and 
friend. As Vulcan was everywhere rampant during 
this age, throwing out enough lava in India alone 
to put a lava blanket four or five feet thick over the 
whole surface of the globe, it was probably this fire 
that charred the wood. It would be interesting to 
know if these enormous lava-flows always followed 
the subsidence of some part of the earth's crust. In 
Cretaceous times both the subsidence and the lava- 
flows seem to have been worldwide. 

IV 

We seem to think that the earth has sown all her 
wild oats, that her riotous youth is far behind her, 
and that she is now passing into a serene old age. 
Had we lived during any of the great periods of the 

111 



TIME AND CHANGE 

past, we might have had the same impression, so 
tranquil, for the most part, has been the earth's his- 
tory, so slow and rhythmical have been the beats 
of the great clock of time. We see this in the homo- 
geneity of the stratified rocks, layer upon layer for 
thousands of feet as uniform in texture and quality 
as the goods a modern factory turns out, every yard 
of it like every other yard. No hitch or break any- 
where. The bedding-planes of many kinds of rock 
occur at as regular intervals as if they had been de- 
termined by some kind of machinery. Here, on the 
formation where I live, there are alternate layers of 
slate and sandstone, three or four inches thick, for 
thousands of feet in extent; they succeed each other 
as regularly as the bricks and mortar in a brick wall, 
and are quite as homogeneous. What does tljis mean 
but that for an incalculable period the processes of 
erosion and deposition went on as tranquilly as a 
summer day? There was no strike among the work- 
men, and no change in the plan of the building, or 
in the material. 

The Silurian limestone, the old red sandstone, 
the Hamilton flag, the Oneida conglomerate, where 
I have known them, are as homogeneous as a snow- 
bank, or as the ice on a mountain lake; grain upon 
grain, all from the same source in each case, and 
sifted and sorted by the same agents, and the finished 
product as uniform in color and quality as the out- 
put of some great mill. 

112 



THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST'S EYES 

Then, after a vast interval, there comes a break: 
something like an end and a new beginning, as if one 
day of creation were finished and a new one begun. 
The different formations lie unconformably upon 
each other, which means revolution of some sort. 
There has been a strike or a riot in the great mill, 
or it has lain idle for a long period, and when it has 
resumed, a different product is the result. Some- 
thing happened between each two layers. What? 

Though in remote geological ages the earth- 
building and earth-shaping forces were undoubtedly 
more active than they are now, and periods of de- 
formation and upheaval were more frequent, yet 
had we lived in any of those periods we should prob- 
ably have found the course of nature, certainly when 
measured by human generations, as even and tran- 
quil as we find it to-day. The great movements are 
so slow and gentle, for the most part, that we should 
not have been aware of them had we been on the 
spot. Once in a million or a half -million years there 
may have been terrific earthquakes and volcanic 
eruptions, such as seem to have taken place in Ter- 
tiary time, and at the end of the Palaeozoic period. 
Yet the vast stretches of time between were evi- 
dently times of tranquillity. 

It is probable that the great glacial winter of 
Pleistocene times came on as gradually as our own 
winter, or through a long period of slowly falling 
temperature, and as it seems to have been many 

113 



TIME AND CHANGE 

hundred thousand times as long, this preceding 
period, or great fall, was probably equally long 
— so long that the whole of recorded human history 
would form but a small fraction of it. It may easily 
be, I think, that we are now living in the spring of the 
great cycle of geologic seasons. The great ice-sheet 
has withdrawn into the Far North like snowbanks 
that linger in our wood in late spring, where it still 
covers Greenland as it once covered this country. 
When the season of summer is reached, some hun- 
dreds of thousands of years hence, it may be that 
tropical life, both animal and vegetable, will again 
flourish on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, as it did 
in Tertiary times. And all this change will come 
about so quietly and so slowly that nobody will 
suspect it. 

That the crust of the earth is becoming more and 
more stable seems a natural conclusion, but that all 
folding and shearing and disruption of the strata 
are at an end, is a conclusion we cannot reach in the 
face of the theory that the earth is shrinking as it 
cools. 

The earth cools and contracts with almost infinite 
slowness, and the great crustal changes that take 
place go on, for the most part, so quietly and gently 
that we should not suspect them were we present on 
the spot, and long generations would not suspect 
them. Elevations have taken place across the beds 
of rivers without deflecting the course of the river; 

114 



THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST'S EYES 

the process was so slow that the river sawed down 
through the rock as fast as it came up. Nearly all 
the great cosmic and terrestrial changes and revolu- 
tions are veiled from us by this immeasurable lapse 
of time. 

Any prediction about the permanence of the land 
as we know it, or as the race has known it, or of our 
immunity from earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, 
or of a change of climate, or of any cosmic catas- 
trophe, based on human experience, is vain and 
worthless. What is or has been in man's time is 
no criterion as to what will be in God's time. The 
periods of great upheaval and deformation in the 
earth's crust appear to be separated by millions of 
years. Away back in pre-Cambrian times, there 
appear to have been immense periods during which 
the peace and repose of the globe were as profound 
as in our own time. Then at the end of Palaeozoic 
time — how many millions of years is only con- 
jectural — the truce of aeons was broken, and the 
dogs of war let loose; it was a period of revolution 
which resulted in the making of one of our greatest 
mountain-systems, the Appalachian, and in an un- 
precedented extinction of species. Later eras have 
witnessed similar revolutions. Why may they not 
come again? The shrinking of the cooling globe 
must still go on, and this shrinking must give rise to 
surface disturbances and dislocations, maybe in the 
uplift of new mountain-ranges from the sea-bot- 

115 



TIME AND CHANGE 

torn, now undreamed of, and in volcanic eruptions 
as great as any in the past. Such a shrinkage and 
eruption made the Hawaiian Islands, probably in 
Tertiary times; such a shrinkage may make other 
islands and other continents before another period 
of equal time has elapsed. 

Of course the periods and eras into which the 
geologists divide geologic time are as arbitrary as 
the months and seasons into which we divide our 
year, and they fade out into each other in much the 
same way; but they are really as marked as our 
seasonal divisions. Not in their climates — for the 
climate of the globe seems to have been uniformly 
warm from pole to pole, without climatic zones, 
throughout the vast stretch of Palaeozoic and Mes- 
ozoic times — but in the succession of animal and 
vegetable life which they show. The rocks are the 
cemeteries of the different forms of life that have 
appeared upon the globe, and here the geologist 
reads their succession in time, and assigns them to 
his geologic horizons accordingly. The same or allied 
forms appeared upon all parts of the earth at ap- 
proximately the same time, so that he can trace his 
different formations around the world by the fossils 
they hold. Each period had its dominant forms. 
The Silurian was the great age of trilobites; the 
Devonian, the age of fishes; Mesozoic times swarm 
with the gigantic reptiles; and in Tertiary times 
the mammals are dominant. Each period and era 

116 



THROUGH THE GEOLOGIST'S EYES 

has its root in that which preceded it. There were 
rude, half -defined fishes in the Silurian, and probably 
the beginning of amphibians in the Devonian, and 
some small mammalian forms in the Mesozoic time, 
and doubtless rude studies of the genus Homo in 
Tertiary times. Nature works up her higher forms 
like a human inventor from rude beginnings. Her 
first models barely suggest her later achievements. 

In the vegetable world it has been the same; from 
the first simple algse in the Cambrian seas up to the 
forests of our own times, the gradation is easily 
traced. Step by step has vegetable life mounted. 

The great majority of the plants and animals of 
one period fail to pass over into the next, just as our 
spring flowers fail to pass over into summer, and 
our summer flowers into fall. But the law of evolu- 
tion is at work, and life always rises on stepping- 
stones of its dead self to higher things. 



HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 

ON the edge of the world my islands lie," sings 
Mrs. Frear in her little lyric on the Hawaiian 
Islands. 

" On the edge of the world my islands lie, 
Under the sun-steeped sky; 
And their waving palms 
Are bounteous alms 
To the soul-spent passer-by. 

" On the edge of the world my islands sleep 
In a slumber soft and deep. 

What should they know 

Of a world of woe, 
And myriad men that weep ? " 

On the rim of the world my fancy seemed to see 
them that May day when we went aboard the huge 
Pacific steamship in San Francisco Harbor, and she 
pointed her prow westward toward the vast wilder- 
ness of the Pacific — on the edge of the world, 
looking out and down across the vast water toward 
Asia and Australia. I wondered if the great iron 
ship could find them, and if we should realize or 
visualize the geography or the astronomy when we 
got there, and see ourselves on the huge rotundity 
of the globe not far above her equatorial girdle. 

Yes, on the rim of the world they lie to the trav- 
eler steaming toward them, and on the rim of the 

119 



TIME AND CHANGE 

world they lie in his memory after his return, bask- 
ing there in that tropical sunlight, forever fanned by 
those cooling trade winds, and encompassed by that 
morning-glory sea. With my mind's eye I behold 
them rising from that enormous abyss of the Pa- 
cific, fire-born and rain-carved, vast volcanic moun- 
tains miles deep under the sea, and in some cases 
miles high above it, clothed with verdure and teem- 
ing with life, the scene of long-gone cosmic strife 
and destruction, now the abode of rural and civic 
peace and plenty. 

The Pacific treated me so much better than the 
Atlantic ever had that I am probably inclined to 
overestimate everything I saw on the voyage. It 
was the first trip at sea that ever gave me any pleas- 
ure. The huge vessels are in themselves a great 
comfort, and in the placid waters and the sliding 
down the rotund side of the great globe under 
warmer and warmer skies one gains a very agree- 
able experience. The first day's run must have car- 
ried us out and over that huge Pacific abyss, the 
Tuscarora Deep, where there were nearly four miles 
of water under us. Some of our aeroplanes have 
gone up half that distance and disappeared from 
sight. I fancy that our ship, more than six hundred 
feet long, would have appeared a very small object, 
floating across this briny firmament, could one have 
looked up at it from the bottom of that sea. 

The Hawaiian Islands rise from the border of that 
120 



HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 

vast deep, and one can fancy how that huge pot must 
have boiled back in Tertiary times, when the red-hot 
lava of which they are mainly built up was poured 
from the interior of the globe. 

Softer and more balmy grew the air every day, 
more and more placid and richly tinted grew the 
sea, till, on the morning of the sixth day, we saw 
ahead of us, low on the horizon, the dim outlines 
of the mountains of Molokai. The island of Oahu, 
upon which Honolulu is situated, was soon in sight. 
It was not long before we saw Diamond Head, a vast 
crater bowl, eight hundred feet high on its ocean 
side, and half a mile across, sitting there upon the 
shore like some huge, strange work of man's hand, 
running back through the hills with a level rim, and 
seaward with a sloping base, brown and ribbed, and 
in every way unique and striking. 

We were approaching a land the child of tropic 
seas and volcanic lava, and many of the features were 
new and strange to us. The mountains looked fa- 
miliar in outline, but the colors of the landscape, the 
soft lilacs, greens, and browns, and the whole atmo- 
sphere of the scene, were unlike anything we had 
ever before seen. And Diamond Head, what a fea- 
ture it was! Had it only had a head, one could 
easily have seen in it a suggestion of a couchant 
lion, bony, huge, and tawny, looking seaward, and 
guarding the harbor of Honolulu which lies just 
behind it. Into this harbor, in the soft morning air, 

121 



TIME AND CHANGE 

our ship soon found its way, and the monotony of 
the vast, unpeopled sea was quickly succeeded by 
human scenes of the most varied and animated 
character, not the least novel of which were the 
swarms of half-amphibious native boys who sur- 
rounded the vessel as she lay at the wharf, and 
with brown, upturned faces and beckoning hands 
tempted the passengers to toss dimes into the 
water. As the coins struck the surface they would 
dive with the ease and quickness of seals, and seize 
the silver apparently before it had gone a yard 
toward the bottom. Holding the coins up to view 
between the thumb and finger, they would slip 
them into their mouths and solicit more. 

On shore we were greeted with the music of the 
Royal Hawaiian Band, and a motley crowd of 
Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and 
Americans, bearing colored Zm, or wreaths of 
flowers, which they waved at friends on board, and 
with which they bedecked them as soon as they 
came off the gangplank. It was a Babel of tongues 
in which the strange, vowel-choked language of the 
Hawaiians was conspicuous. 

Honolulu is a beautiful city, clean, bright, well 
ordered, and well appointed, — electric lights, good 
streets, electric cars, fine hotels and clubs, excel- 
lent fire protection, mountain water, libraries, parks, 
handsome buildings, attractive homes, — in fact, all 
that we boast of in our home cities. Embosomed in 

122 



HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 

palms, with mangoes, and other tropical trees, with 
a profusion of gorgeously colored vines and hedges, 
with spacious, well-kept grounds about the large 
and comfortable houses in the residential portion 
— these features, with the ready hospitality of the 
people, made our hearts warm towards it at once. 

Volcanic heights on all the land side look down 
upon the city. Mount Tantalus, rising four thousand 
feet above the sea, is just back of it, with its long 
slopes of volcanic ash and sand now clothed by for- 
ests and fertile fields, and a huge ancient crater 
called the Punch Bowl, born probably on the self- 
same day, the geologists think, as Diamond Head, 
dominates the city in the immediate foreground. 
If the Punch Bowl were again to overflow with the 
fiery liquid, the city would soon go up in smoke. 
But its bowl-like interior is now covered with grass 
and trees, and presents a scene of the most peaceful, 
rural character. 

The Orient and the Occident meet in Honolulu. 
There Asia and America join hands. The main 
features of the city are decidedly American, but the 
people seen upon the street and at work indoors and 
out are more than half Oriental. The native popu- 
lation cuts only a small figure. The real workers — 
carpenters, masons, field hands, and house ser- 
vants — are mostly Japanese. Virtually all the 
work of the immense sugar plantations is done by 
the little brown men and women, while China sup? 

m 



TIME AND CHANGE 

plies some of the merchants in the city and the sail- 
ors and stewards on the ocean steamers. What 
admirable servants the Chinese make, so respectful, 
so prompt, so silent, so quick to comprehend ! The 
Japanese house servants on the islands also give 
efficient and gracious service. 

I had gone to Honolulu reluctantly, but tarried 
there joyfully. The fine climate, with its even 
temperature of about eighty degrees Fahrenheit, 
and with all that is enervating or oppressive in that 
degree of heat winnowed out of it by the ceaseless 
trade winds; the almost unbroken sunshine, per- 
fumed now and then by a sprinkle of sunlit rain 
from the mountains; the wonderful sea laving the 
shores on the one hand and the cool, cloud-capped, 
and rain-drenched heights within easy reach on the 
other; the green, cozy valleys; the broad sweep of 
plain; the new, strange nature on every side; the 
novel and delicious fruits; the pepsin-charged 
papaya, or tree melon, which tickles the palate while 
it heals and renews the whole digestive system; 
the mangoes (oh, the mangoes !) ; the cordiality of 
the people; the inviting bungalows; the clean 
streets; the good service everywhere — all made 
me feel how mistaken was my reluctance. 

Most of the Americans one meets there are de- 
scendants of the missionaries who went out from 
New England and New York early in the last cen- 
tury, and one feels at home with them at once. 

124 



HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 

Many of the residents there have been educated in 
the States. The Governor, Mr. Frear, is a gradu- 
ate of Yale; his wife is a graduate of Wellesley. One 
day a charming Southern woman, president of the 
College Club, invited us to meet the college women 
of the city. The gathering took place under the trees 
upon the lawn of one of the older homesteads. 
There were forty college women present, many of 
them teachers, from Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Bryn 
Mawr, and Barnard. Among them were two girls 
who had visited me at my cabin, "Slabsides," 
while they were at Vassar. 

Wide as is the world, the traveler is pretty sure 
to strike threads of relation with his home country 
wherever he goes. I made the acquaintance in 
Honolulu of a man from my own county; another, 
who showed us great kindness, was from an adjoin- 
ing county; while one day upon the street I was 
called by name by a man whom I had known as a 
boy in the town where I now live. 

One Saturday a walking-club, largely made up of 
men and women teachers, whose native Hawaiian 
name meant "Walkers in Unfrequented Places," 
asked us to join them in a walk up Palola Valley to 
the site of an extinct crater well up in the moun- 
tains. These walkers in unfrequented places proved 
to be real walkers, and gave us all and more than we 
had bargained for — more mud and wet and slip- 
pery trails through clinging vines and rank lantana 

125 



TIME AND CHANGE 

scrub than was good for our shoes and garments or 
for the bodies inside them. It was a long pull of 
many miles, at first up the valley over a fair high- 
way, then into the woods on the mountain-side 
along a trail that was muddy and slippery from the 
recent showers, and most of the time was buried 
out of sight beneath the high, coarse stag-horn fern 
and a thick growth of lantana that met above it as 
high as our shoulders. A more discouraging moun- 
tain climb I never undertook. The vegetation was all 
novel, but it had that barbaric rankness of all tropi- 
cal woods, with nothing of the sylvan sweetness and 
simplicity of our home woods. There were no fine, 
towering trees, but low, gnarled, and tortuous ones, 
which, with their hanging vines, like the broken 
ropes of a ship's rigging, and their parasitic growths, 
presented a riotous, disheveled appearance. 

Nature in the tropics, left to herself, is harsh, 
aggressive, savage; looks as though she wanted to 
hang you with her dangling ropes, or impale you 
on her thorns, or engulf you in her ranks of gigantic 
ferns. Her mood is never as placid and sane as in 
the North. There is a tree in the Hawaiian woods 
that suggests a tree gone mad. It is called the 
hau-tree. It lies down, squirms, and wriggles all 
over the ground like a wounded snake; it gets up, 
and then takes to earth again. Now it wants to be 
a vine, now it wants to be a tree. It throws somer- 
saults, it makes itself into loops and rings, it rolls, 

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HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 

it reaches, it doubles upon itself. Altogether it is 
the craziest vegetable growth I ever saw. Where 
you can get it up off the ground and let it perform 
its antics on a broad skeleton framework, it makes 
a cover that no sunbeam can penetrate, and forms 
a living roof to the most charming verandas — or 
lanais, as they are called in the islands — that one 
can wish to see. 

But I saw and heard one thing on this walk that 
struck a different note: it was one of the native 
birds, the Oahu thrush. The moment I heard it I 
was reminded of our brown thrasher, though the 
song, or whistle, was much finer and richer in tone 
than that of our bird. The glimpse I got of the bird 
showed it to be of about the size and shape of our 
thrasher, but much brighter in color. It seems as 
though the two species must have had a common 
origin some time, somewhere. I was attracted by 
no other native bird on this walk. In the valley be- 
low we had seen and heard the Chinese workmen 
going about their rice-fields making strange sounds 
to drive away the rice-birds, a small, brown species 
that has been introduced from India. 

When we reached the mountain-top, we found 
it enveloped in fog and mist, and the scene was cold 
and cheerless. We looked down through a screen of 
foliage into a deep valley that seemed almost be- 
neath us, and which is supposed to have been an 
ancient crater. There, on the brink, the walkers had 

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TIME AND CHANGE 

a rude cabin, where we ate our lunch beside a fire 
and tried to dry our bedraggled garments. 

From this point some of the party continued their 
walk, looking for more unfrequented places, but 
some of us had longings the other way, and retraced 
our steps toward the sunlight and the drier winds 
we had left. We reached town footsore and be- 
draggled, and the little Japanese who cleaned and 
pressed my suit of clothes, and made them look as 
good as new for seventy-five cents, well earned his 
money. 

The walk of eight or ten miles which we took two 
weeks later with Governor Frear and his wife, up the 
new Castle trail to the mountain-top behind Tan- 
talus, had some features in common with the first 
walk, — the increasing mist and coolness as we 
entered the mountains, the dripping bushes, and the 
slippery paths, — but we got finer views, and found 
a better-kept trail. Our walk ended on the top of 
a narrow ridge of the mountain, where we ate our 
lunch in a cold, driving mist and were a bit uncom- 
fortable. I was interested in the character of the 
ridge upon which we sat. It was not more than six 
feet wide, a screen of volcanic rock worn almost to 
an edge, and separated two valleys six or seven hun- 
dred feet deep. The Governor said he could take me 
where the dividing ridge between the two valleys 
was so narrow that one could literally sit astride of 
it, so that one leg would point to one valley and the 

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HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 

other to the other. This is a feature of a new coun- 
try geologically; the rains and other agents of ero- 
sion have whittled the mountains to sharp edges, 
but have not yet rounded or leveled them. 

The northeast trade winds which blow upon these 
islands nine months in the year bring a burden of 
moisture from the Pacific which is condensed into 
rain and mist by the mountains, and which, with 
the rank vegetation that it fosters, carves them and 
sharpens them like a great grindstone revolving 
against their sides. At a place called the Pali — 
and at the Needles, on the island of Maui — it has 
worn through the mountain-chain and made deep 
and very picturesque gorges where, in the case of 
the Pali, the wind is so strong and steady that you 
can almost lie down upon it. 

It was near the Pali that I saw what I had never 
seen or heard of before — a waterfall reversed, go- 
ing up instead of dowii. It suggested Stockton's 
story of negative gravity. A small brook comes 
down off the mountain and attempts to make the 
leap down a high precipice; but the winds catch it 
and carry it straight up in the air like smoke. It is 
translated; it becomes a mere wraith hovering above 
the beetling crag. Night and day this goes on, the 
wind snatching from the mountains in this sum- 
mary way the water it has brought them. 

On the walk with the Governor we made the ac- 
quaintance of some of the land shells for which these 

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TIME AND CHANGE 

islands are famous — pretty, pearl-like little whorls 
living on the largest trees, and about the size of a 
chipping sparrow's egg, with pointed ends, variously- 
colored. There are more than two hundred species 
on the different islands, I think, each valley having 
varieties peculiar to itself, showing what a factor 
isolation is in the evolution of new species. The 
Governor and his wife, and a young man who had 
specialized in conchology, plucked them from nearly 
every bush and tree; but my eye, being untrained 
in this kind of work, was very slow in finding 
them. 

Coming down from these Hawaiian mountains 
is like coming out of a dripping tent of clouds into 
the clear, warm sunshine. The change is most de- 
lightful. Your clothing dries very quickly, and chil- 
liness gives place to genial warmth. And the pro- 
spects that open before you, the glimpses down 
into these deep, yellow-green, crater-like valleys, 
checkered with neat little Chinese farms, the pano- 
rama of the city and the sea unrolling as you come 
down, and always Diamond Head standing guard 
there to the east — how the vision of it all lingers 
in the memory ! 

In climbing the heights, it was always a surprise 
to me to see the Pacific rise up as I rose, till it stood 
up like a great blue wall there against the horizon. 
A level plain unrolls in the same way as we mount 
above it, but it does not produce the same illusion 

130 



HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 

of rising up like a wall or a mountain-range ; the 
blue, facile water cheats the eye. 

One 6f the novel pleasures in which most travelers 
indulge while in Honolulu is surf-riding at Waikiki, 
near Diamond Head. The sea, with a floor of lava 
and coral, is here shallow for a long distance out, 
and the surf comes in at intervals like a line of 
steeds cantering over a plain. We went out in our 
bathing-suits in a long, heavy dugout, with a lusty 
native oarsman in each end. When several hundred 
yards from shore, we saw, on looking seaward, the 
long, shining billows coming, whereupon our oars- 
men headed the canoe toward shore, and plied their 
paddles with utmost vigor, uttering simultaneously 
a curious, excited cry. In a moment the breaker 
caught us and, in some way holding us on its crest, 
shot us toward the shore like an arrow. The sensa- 
tion is novel and thrilling. The foam flies; the 
waters leap about you. You are coasting on the sea, 
and you shout with delight and pray for the sensation 
to continue. But it is quickly over. The hurrying 
breaker slips from under you, and leaves you in the 
trough, while it goes foaming on the shore. Then 
you turn about and row out from the shore again, 
and wait for another chance to be shot toward the 
land on the foaming crest of a great Pacific wave. 

I suppose the trick is in the skill of the oarsmen 
in holding the boat on the pitch of the billow so 
that in its rush it takes you with it. The native 

131 



TIME AND CHANGE 

boys do the feat standing on a plank. I was tempted 
to try this myself, but of course made a comical 
failure. 

One of my pleasant surprises in Honolulu — one 
that gave the touch of nature which made me feel 
less a stranger there — was learning that the Euro- 
pean skylark had been introduced and was thriving 
on the grassy slopes back of the city. The mina, a 
species of starling from India as large as our robin 
and rather showily dressed, with a loud, strident 
voice, I had seen and heard everywhere both in 
town and country, but he was a stranger and did 
not appeal to me. But the thought of the skylark 
brought Shelley and Wordsworth, and English 
downs and meadows, near to me at once, and I was 
eager to hear it. So early one morning we left the 
Pleasanton, our tarry ing-place, and climbed the 
long, pastoral slope above the city, where cattle and 
horses were grazing, and listened for this minstrel 
from the motherland. We had not long to wait. 
Sure enough, not far from us there sprang from the 
turf Shelley's bird, and went climbing his invisible 
spiral toward the sky, pouring out "those hurried, 
ecstatic notes, just as I had heard him above the 
South Downs of England. It was a moment of keen 
delight to me. The bird soared and hovered, drift- 
ing about, as it were, before the impetuous current 
of his song, with all the joy and abandon with which 
the poets have credited him. It was like a bit of 

132 



HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 

English literature vocal in the air there above these 
alien scenes. Presently another went up, and then 
another, and still another, the singers behaving 
in every respect as they do by the Avon and the 
Tweed, and for a moment I seemed to be breathing 
the air that Wordsworth and Shelley breathed. 

If our excursion had taken us only to the island 
of Oahu and its beautiful city, it would have been 
eminently worth while, but the last week in May we 
took what is called the inter-island trip, a six days' 
voyage among the various islands, when we visited 
the great extinct crater of Haleakala on Maui, and 
the active volcano Kilauea on Hawaii. It is a voy- 
age over several rough channels in a small steamer, 
and my friends said, "If you have not yet paid 
tribute to Neptune, you will pay it now." But I did 
not. My companions were prostrated, but I see 
Neptune respects age, and my slumbers were undis- 
turbed. A wireless message had gone to Mr. Aiken, 
on the island of Maui, to meet us with his auto- 
mobile in the morning at the landing at Kahului. 
We were taken to the shore on a lighter, along with 
the horses and cargo, and there found our new 
friend awaiting us. 

The great mountain of Haleakala rose up in a long 
line against the sky on the left, and the deeply 
eroded and canoned mountains of the older, or west, 
end of the island on our right. Toward the latter our 
guide took us. It was a pleasant spin along the good 

133 



TIME AND CHANGE 

roads, in the fresh morning air, near the beach, to 
Wailuku, the shire town of the island, two or three 
miles distant. Here we were most hospitably enter- 
tained in the home of Mr. Penhallow, the director 
of a large sugar plantation. 

Here for the first time in my life I saw a gang of 
steam plows working, pulled by a stationary engine 
at each end of the field, and turning over the red, 
heavy volcanic soil. The work was mainly in the 
hands of Japanese, and was well done. We after- 
ward saw Japanese by the score, both men and 
women, planting a large area of newly plowed 
land with sugar-cane. 

After we were rested and refreshed, and had 
sampled the mangoes that had fallen from a tree 
near the house, Mr. Aiken took us in his automobile 
up into the famous Iao Valley, at the mouth of 
which Wailuku is situated. It is a deep, striking 
chasm carved out of the mountain by the stream, 
rank with verdure of various kinds, and looked 
down upon by sharp peaks and ridges five or six 
thousand feet high. We soon reached the clear 
rapid, brawling stream, as bright as a Catskill moun- 
tain trout brook, and after a mile or two along its 
course we came to the end of the road, where we left 
the machine and took a trail that wound onward and 
upward over a slippery surface and through dripping 
bushes, for we here began to reach the skirts of the 
little showers that almost constantly career over and 

134 



HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 

about the interior of these mountains. I neither saw 
nor heard a bird or other live thing. Guava apples 
lay on the ground all along the trail, and one could 
eat them and not make faces. Some of the sharp, 
knife-blade ridges that cut down toward us from the 
higher peaks were very startling, and so steep and 
high that they could be successfully scaled only by 
the aid of ropes and ladders. A more striking object- 
lesson in erosion by rain would be hard to find. 
There were no naked rocks; short, thick vegetation 
covered even the steepest slopes, and the vegetable 
acids which this generated, and the perpetual rains, 
weathered the mountains down. It soon became so 
wet that we stopped far short of the head of the val- 
ley, and turned back. I wished to look into the 
great, deep, green amphitheatre which seems to lie 
at the head, but had glimpses of it only from a dis- 
tance. How many millenniums will it be, I said to 
myself, before erosion will have completed its work 
here, and these thin, high mountain-walls will be 
in ruins? Surely not many. 

We returned to the hospitable home we had left, 
and passed the midday there. In the afternoon Mr. 
Aiken, guiding our eyes by the forms of trees that 
cut the horizon-line on the huge flank of Haleakala, 
pointed out the place of his own homestead, twenty 
or more miles away. From this point the great 
mountain appeared like a vast landscape tilted up 
at an easy angle against the horizon. One could 

135 



TIME AND CHANGE 

hardly believe it was ten thousand feet high. The 
machine climbed easily more than half the distance 
to Mr. Aiken's plantation, which we reached in good 
time in the afternoon, and where we passed a very 
enjoyable night. It was a surprise to find swarms 
of mosquitoes at this altitude, so free from all 
mosquito-breeding waters. But the house was well 
protected against them. Mosquitoes, as well as flies 
and vermin, are not native to the island. They 
came in ships not very long ago, and are now very 
troublesome in certain parts. They came round 
the Horn. Mr. Aiken's house itself came round 
the Horn seventy or eighty years ago. It is a 
quaint, New England type of house, and has a very 
homelike look. In front of it, near the gate, stands 
a Japanese pine which is an object of veneration to 
all Japanese who chance to come that way. Often 
their eyes fill with tears on beholding it, so respon- 
sive are the little yellow men to associations of 
home. 

In the morning Mr. Aiken drove us in a wagon to 
a place he has called "Idlewild," six miles farther 
up the great slope of the mountain. This slope of 
Haleakala is like a whole township, diversified with 
farms and woods, valleys and hills, resting on its 
elbows, so to speak, and looking out over the Pacific. 
We could look up to the cloud-line, about seven 
thousand feet above the sea, and occasionally get a 
glimpse of the long line of the summit through rifts 

136 



HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 

in the clouds. At Idlewild our expedition, consist- 
ing of six mules and four people, was fitted out, and 
in the early afternoon we started on the trail up the 
mountain. 

For several miles our way led over grassy slopes 
where cattle were grazing, and above which sky- 
larks were singing. This was one of the happy sur- 
prises of the trip — the soaring and singing sky- 
larks. All the way till we reached the cloud-belt, 
we had the larks pouring down their music from the 
sky above us. They seemed specially jubilant. It 
was May in England, too, and they sang as though 
the spirit of those downs and fells was stirring in 
their hearts, under alien skies, but true to the mem- 
ories of home. 

Before we reached the summit we came upon an- 
other introduction from overseas — the English 
pheasant. One started up from some bushes only a 
few yards from the trail, went booming away, and 
disappeared in a deep gully. A little later another 
sprang up, uttering a cackling cry as it flew away. 
We saw three altogether. The only home thing we 
saw was white clover in patches here and there, and 
it gave a most welcome touch to the unfamiliar 
scenes. 

The cattle we passed on the way were suffering 
dreadfully from another introduction from the States 
— the Texas horn-fly, which had recently made its 
appearance. The poor beasts were driven half- 

137 



TIME AND CHANGE 

crazy by it, as their sunken eyes and poor condition 
plainly showed. 

The trail became rougher and steeper as we as- 
cended, and the grass and trees gave place to low, 
scrubby bushes. We were half an hour or more in 
the cloud-belt, where the singing skylarks did not 
follow us. The clouds proved to be as loose of tex- 
ture and as innocent as any summer fog that loiters 
in our valleys; but it was good to emerge into the 
sunshine again, and see the jagged line of the top 
sensibly nearer, and the canopy of clouds unroll 
itself beneath us. Far ahead of us and near the 
summit we saw a band of wild goats — twenty -two, 
I counted — leisurely grazing along, and now and 
then casting glances down upon us. They were 
domestic animals gone wild, and still retained their 
bizarre colors of white and black. One big black 
leader with a long beard looked down at us and 
shook his head threateningly. We reached the sum- 
mit before the sun reached the horizon, and our eyes 
looked forth upon a strange world, indeed. On 
one hand the vast sea of cloud, into which the sun 
was about to drop, rolled away from the mountain 
below us, with its white surface and the irregular 
masses rising up from it, suggesting a sea of float- 
ing ice. Through rifts in it we caught occasional 
glimpses of the Pacific — blue, vague, mystical gulfs 
that seemed filled with something less substantial 
than water. On the other hand was the vast crater 

138 



HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 

of Haleakala, two thousand feet deep, and many 
miles across, in which the shadows were deepening, 
and which looked like some burned-out Hades. 

We stood or sat on the jagged edge and saw the 
day depart and the night come down, the glory of 
cloud and sea and sunset on the one hand, and on 
the other side the fearful chasm of the extinct vol- 
cano, red and black and barren, with the hosts of 
darkness gathering in it. It was like a seat between 
heaven and hell. Then later, when the Southern 
Cross came out and rose above the awful gulf, the 
scene was most impressive. 

The crater of Haleakala is said to be the largest 
extinct crater in the world. To follow all its out- 
lines would lead one a distance of more than twenty 
miles, but it is so irregular in shape that one gets 
only a poor conception of its extent in a view from 
its brink. At its widest part it cannot be more than 
four or five miles across. It was evidently formed 
by the whole top of the mountain having been blown 
out or else sunk down in recent geologic times. The 
fragments of jagged rock that thickly strew the sur- 
face all about the summit look as if they might have 
fallen there. The floor of the interior of the crater 
is thickly studded with many minor craters, through 
which the internal fires found vent after the crater 
as a whole had ceased to act. They are of the shape of 
huge haystacks, with a hole in the top, and looked 
soft and yielding in outline, and in color as though 

139 



TIME AND CHANGE 

they were composed of soot and brick-dust. One of 
them is much larger than any of the rest. I thought 
it might be two hundred feet high. " It is eight hun- 
dred," said our guide; yet its summit was more than 
a thousand feet below the rim upon which we sat. 
There has been no eruption in Haleakala since 
early in the last century. Over a large area of the 
interior the black lava, cracked and crumpled, meets 
the eye. Miles down one of its great arms toward 
the sea, we could see the green lines of vegetation, 
mostly rank ferns, advancing like an invading army. 
Far ahead were the skirmishers, loose bands of ferns, 
with individual plants here and there pushing on 
over the black, uneven surface toward the second- 
ary craters of the centre. Vegetation was also 
climbing down the ragged sides of the crater, drop- 
ping from rock to rock like an invading host. The 
ferns, those pioneers of the vegetable world, appear 
to come first. Their giant progenitors subdued the 
rocks and made the soil in Carboniferous times, and 
prepared the way for higher vegetable forms, and 
now these striplings take up the same task in this 
primitive world of the crater of Haleakala. Their 
task is a long and arduous one, much more so than 
in those parts of the island where the rainfall is more 
copious; but give them time enough, and the barren 
lava will all be clothed with verdure. When decom- 
posed and ripened by time, it makes a red, heavy 
soil that supports many kinds of plants and trees. 

140 



HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 

The ferns come slowly marching in from without, 
but in the centre of the crater, on the slopes of the 
red cones and at their bases, is another plant that 
seems indigenous, born of the ash and the scoria of 
the volcano, and that apparently has no chlorophyl 
in its make-up. This is a striking plant, called the 
silver sword, from the shape and color of its long, 
narrow leaves. They are the color of frosted silver, 
and are curved like a sword. It is a strange appari- 
tion, white and delicate and rare, springing up in 
the crater of a slumbering volcano. A more striking 
contrast with the atmosphere of the surroundings 
would be hard to find — a suggestion of peace and 
purity above the graves of world-destroying forces, 
an angel of light nourished by the ashes of the de- 
mons of death and darkness. 

It is claimed by the people of the island that this 
plant is found in no other place on the globe, but 
this can hardly be possible. If its evolution took 
place in one crater, it would take place in another. 
It consists of a great mass of silvery-white, bristling 
leaves resting upon the ground, from which rises a 
stalk, strung with flowers, to the height of five or 
six feet. It is evidently of the Yucca type of plant, 
and has met with a singular transformation in the 
sleeping volcano's mouth, all its harsh and savage 
character turned into gentleness and grace, its 
armament of needles and daggers giving place to a 
soft, silvery down. We did not see the plant grow- 

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TIME AND CHANGE 

ing except at a great distance, through field-glasses, 
but we saw a photograph of it and a dried specimen 
after we came down from the summit. 

It is an all day's trip down into the crater and 
back, climbing over sliding sands and loose scoria, 
and our time was too limited to undertake it. We 
passed the night on the summit in a rude stone 
hut, which had a fireplace where the guide made 
coffee, but we had only the volcanic rock for floor. 
Upon this we spread our ample supply of blankets, 
and got such sleep as is to be had on high, cold 
mountain-tops, where the ribs of the mountain 
prove to be so much harder than one's own ribs — 
not a first-class quality of sleep, but better than 
none. 

I arose about two o'clock, and made my way out 
into the star-blazing night. Such glory of the hea- 
vens I had never before seen. I had never before 
been lifted up so near them, and hence had never 
before seen them through so rarefied an atmosphere. 
The clouds and vapors had disappeared, and all the 
hosts of heaven were magnified. The Milky Way 
seemed newly paved and swept. There was no wind 
and no sound. The mighty crater was a gulf of 
blackness, but the sky blazed with light. 

The dawn comes early on such a mountain-top, 
and before four o'clock we were out under the fad- 
ing stars. As we had seen the day pass into night, 
surrounded by these wonderful scenes, now we saw 

142 



HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 

the night pass into day, and the elemental grandeur 
on every hand reborn before us. There was not a 
wisp of cloud or fog below us or about us to blur the 
great picture. The sun came up from behind the 
vast, long, high wall of the Pacific that filled the 
eastern horizon, and the shadows fled from the huge 
pile of mountain in the west. We hung about the 
rim of the great crater or sat upon the jagged rocks, 
wrapped in our blankets, till the sun was an hour 
high. 

We got another glimpse of the band of goats pick- 
ing their way from ledge to ledge far below us on the 
side of the crater. I saw and heard two or three 
mina birds fly past, apparently seeking new territory 
to occupy. These birds are more enterprising than 
the English sparrows, which also swarm in the 
island towns but do not brave the mountain- 
heights. The bird from India seems at home every- 
where. 

After breakfast we still haunted for an hour or 
more the brink of the great abyss, where one seemed 
to feel the pulse of primal time, loath to tear our- 
selves away, loath also to take a last view of the 
panorama of land and sea, lit by the morning sun, 
which spread out far below us. To the southeast 
we could dimly see the outlines of the island of 
Hawaii, with a faint gleam of snow on its great 
mountain Mauna Loa, nearly fourteen thousand 
feet high. In the northwest a dim, dark mass low 

143 



TIME AND CHANGE 

in the horizon marked the place of Oahu. The 
ocean rose in the vast horizon and blended with the 
sky. The eye could not tell where one ended and the 
other began. 

The mules had had a comfortable night in a rude 
stone stable against the rocks, and were more eager 
to hit the down trail than were we. The descent 
proved more fatiguing than the ascent, the con- 
stant plunging motion of the animals' shoulders 
being a sore trial. We dropped down through the 
belt of clouds that had begun to form, and out into 
the grassy region of the singing skylarks, past herds 
of grazing cattle, and at noon were again at Idle- 
wild, resting our weary limbs and comforting the 
inner man. 

In the afternoon Mr. Aiken drove us back to his 
home farm, where we again passed a very pleasant 
night. In the morning I walked with him through 
his pineapple plantation. It was a new kind of farm- 
ing and fruit-growing to me. I forget now how 
many hundred thousand plants his field contained. 
They are set and cultivated much as cabbage is 
with us, but present a strangely stiff and forbidding 
aspect. The first cutting is when the plants are 
about eighteen months old, one large solid apple 
from each plant. The second crop is called the 
"raggoon" crop, and yields two apples from each 
plant, but smaller and less valuable than the first. 
The field is then reset. I also walked with Mr. 

144 



HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 

Aiken over some new land he was getting ready for 
pineapples. It had been densely covered with lan- 
tana scrub, and clearing it and grubbing it out had 
been an heroic task. The lantana takes complete 
possession of the soil, grows about four or five feet 
high, and makes a network of roots in the soil that 
defies anything but a steam plow. The soil is a red, 
heavy clay, and it made the farmer in me sweat to 
think of the expenditure of labor necessary to turn 
a lantana bush into a pineapple field. The redness 
of this volcanic soil is said to be owing to the fact 
that the growth of vegetation brings the iron into 
new combinations with organic acids. 

Later in the day we visited the large Baldwin 
pineapple-canning plant, and were shown the 
whole process of preparing and canning the fruit, 
and all but surfeited with the most melting and de- 
licious pineapples it was ever my good luck to taste. 
The Hawaiian pineapple probably surpasses all 
others in tenderness and lusciousness, and it loses 
scarcely any of these qualities in the cans. Ripened 
in the field, where it grew on the flanks of great 
Haleakala, and eaten out of hand, it is a dream of 
tropic lusciousness. The canning is done by an 
elaborate system of machinery managed by Japan- 
ese men and women, the naked hand never coming in 
contact with the peeled fruit, but protected from it 
by long, thin rubber gloves. There ought to be a 
great future for this industry, when Eastern con- 

145 



TIME AND CHANGE 

sumers really find out the superior quality of the 
Hawaiian product. 

From Mr. Aiken's house one has a view of the 
great wall of mountains that form the western and 
older — older geologically — end of the island, 
in which lies the famous Iao Valley, which I have 
already described. We judge, from the much deeper 
marks of rain erosion, that this end of the island 
is vastly older than the butt end upon which Halea- 
kala is situated. Haleakala is eroded comparatively 
little. On all it y s huge northern slope there is only one 
considerable gash or gully, and this is probably not 
many thousand years old; but the northwestern end 
of the island is worn and carved in the most striking 
manner. Looking at it that morning, I compared 
it to my extended, relaxed hand, the northern end 
being gashed and grooved like the sunken spaces be- 
tween the fingers, while the southwest end, not more 
than ten miles distant, was only slightly grooved and 
more like the solid wrist and back hand. All the 
rains brought by the northeast trades fall upon the 
northeast end of the islands. The mountain-peaks 
on the end hold the clouds and strip them dry, so that 
little or no rain falls upon the south and southwest 
sides. This is true of all the islands. One end of 
each is arid and barren, while the other is wet and 
verdant. One of the smaller islands, Kahoolawe, I 
believe, dominated by Maui on the northeast, is said 
to be drying up and blowing away by inches. 

146 



HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 

What a spell the mountains do lay upon the 
clouds everywhere, — the robber mountains, — in 
these islands exacting the last drop of water of all 
the ocean-born vapors that pass over them ! On the 
northeast side of the Lahaina district there are val- 
leys four or five thousand feet deep; on the southwest 
side there are no valleys worth mentioning. The 
difference in this respect was forcibly brought home 
to me when, later in the day, we made an automo- 
bile trip from Wailuku to Lahaina on the south- 
west side; in going less than twenty miles we quickly 
passed from the region of verdant valleys and 
mountain-slopes into a hard, raw, barren, unweath- 
ered region, where there was no soil, and where the 
rocks looked as crude and forbidding as they must 
have looked the day they flowed out from the 
depths as molten lava. In outline the island of 
Maui suggests a truncated statue, the west end 
representing the head, very old and wrinkled and 
grooved by time and trouble, the peninsula the 
well-proportioned neck, and broad-breasted Halea- 
kala forming the trunk. What a torso it is, fire- 
born and basking there in the tropic seas ! 

The oldest island of the Hawaiian group is Kauai, 
called the garden island, because it has much the 
deepest and most fertile soil. It shows much more 
evidence of erosion than any of the other islands. 
The next in point of erosion, and hence in point 
of age, is Oahu, upon which Honolulu is situated. 

147 



TIME AND CHANGE 

Then come Molokai and Maui, the two ends of the 
latter being of vastly unequal age. Hawaii, the 
largest of them all, nearly as large as Connecticut, 
is the youngest of the group, and shows the least 
effects of erosion. When it is as old as Kauai is now, 
its two huge mountains, Mauna Loa and Mauna 
Kea, will probably be cut up into deep valleys and 
canons and sharp, high ridges, as are the mountains 
of Kauai and Oahu. The lapse of time required to 
bring about such a result is beyond all human cal- 
culation. Whether one million or two millions of 
years would do it, who knows? Those warm tropi- 
cal rains, aided by the rank vegetation which they 
beget and support, dissolve the volcanic rock slowly 
but inevitably. 

Through the courtesy of Mr. Lowell, the super- 
intendent, we had that day the pleasure of going 
through a large sugar-making plant at Paia — one 
that turns out nearly fifty thousand tons of sugar a 
year. We saw the cane come in from the fields in one 
end of the plant, and the dry, warm product being 
put up in bags at the other. All the latest devices 
and machinery for sugar-making we saw here in full 
operation, affording a contrast to the crude and 
wasteful methods I had seen in the island of Jamaica 
a few years before. 

In the afternoon we availed ourselves of the five 
or six miles of narrow-gauge railway, the only one on 
the island, to go from Paia to Wailuku, where we 

148 



HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 

were met by another automobile, which hurried us 
to Lahaina, where we were to meet the steamer 
that was to convey us to Hilo, on Hawaii. I say 
"hurried," but before the journey of twenty-odd 
miles was half over, we realized the truth of the old 
adage, "The more haste, the less speed." The 
automobile began to sulk and finally could be per- 
suaded to go only on the low gear, and to rattle 
along at about the speed of a man with a horse and 
buggy. We reached Lahaina just as the boat was 
entering the harbor. 

The next morning we found ourselves steaming 
along past the high, verdant shores of Hawaii. For 
fifty miles or more the land presented one unbroken 
expanse of sugar-cane, suggesting fields of some 
gigantic yellow-green grass. At Hilo the sun was 
shining between brief showers, and the air was warm 
and muggy. It is said to rain there every day in the 
year, and the lush vegetation made the statement 
seem credible. Judge Andrews met us at the steamer, 
and took us to his home for rest and dinner, and was 
extremely kind to us. 

In the mid-afternoon we took the train for 
Glenwood, thirty miles on our way to the volcano 
of Kilauea. A large part of the way the road leads 
through sugar plantations, newly carved out of the 
koa and tree-fern wilderness that originally covered 
the volcanic soil. Clusters of the little houses of the 
Japanese laborers, perched high above the ground 

149 



TIME AND CHANGE 

on slender posts, were passed here and there. Ev- 
erywhere we saw wooden aqueducts, or flumes, 
winding around the contours of the hills and across 
the little valleys, often on high trestle-work, and 
partly filled with clear, swift-running water, in 
which the sugar-cane was transported to the mills. 

At Glenwood stages meet the tourists and convey 
them over a fairly good road that winds through the 
tree-fern forests to the Volcano House, ten miles 
away. The beauty of that fern-lined forest, the 
long, stately plumes of the gigantic ferns meeting the 
eye everywhere, I shall not soon forget. I saw what 
appeared to be a large, showy red raspberry grow- 
ing by the roadside, but I did not find it at all 
tempting to the taste. 

It was dark when we reached the Volcano House, 
and we saw off to the left a red glow upon the fog- 
clouds, like the reflected light from a burning barn 
or house in the country, and inferred at once that 
it came from the volcano, which it did. From my 
window that night, as I lay in bed, I could see 
this same angry glow upon the clouds. The smell 
of sulphur was in the air about the hotel, and very 
hot steam was issuing from cracks in the rocks. A 
party of tourists on horseback, in the spirit of true 
American hurry, visited the volcano that night, but 
we chose to wait until the morrow. 

The next morning the great crater of Kilauea was 
filled with fog, but it lifted, and the sun shone be- 

150 



HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 

fore noon. We passed a pleasant forenoon strolling 
along the tree-fringed brink, looking down eight or 
nine hundred feet upon its black lava floor, and 
plucking ohelo berries, which grew there abund- 
antly, a kind of large, red huckleberry that one could 
eat out of hand, but that one could not get excited 
over. They were better in a pie than in the hand. 
Their name seemed to go well with the suggestion of 
the scenes amid which they grew. Kilauea is a round 
extinct crater about three miles across and seven 
or eight hundred feet deep. It has been the scene 
of terrific explosions in past ages, but it has now 
dwindled to the small active crater of Halemaumau, 
which is sunk near the middle of it like a huge pot, 
two hundred or more feet deep and a thousand feet 
across. 

In the mid-afternoon a party of eight or ten of us 
on horseback set out to visit the volcano. The trail 
led down the broken and shelving side of the crater, 
amid trees and bushes, till it struck the floor of lava 
at the bottom. In going down I was aware all the 
time of a beautiful bird-song off on my left, a song 
almost as sweet as that of our hermit thrush, but of 
an entirely different order. I think it was the song 
of one of the honey-suckers, a red bird with black 
wings that in flight looked like our scarlet tanager. 

Our course took us out over the cracked and con- 
torted lava-beds, where no green thing was growing. 
The forms of the lava-flow suggested mailed and 

151 



TIME AND CHANGE 

writhing dragons, with horrid, gaping mouths and 
vicious claws. The lava crunched beneath the 
horses' feet like shelly and brittle ice. At one point 
we passed over a wide, jagged crack on a bridge. 
As we neared the crater, the rocks grew warm, and 
sulphur and other fumes streaked the air. 

When a half-mile from the crater we dismounted, 
and, leaving our horses in charge of the guide, pro- 
ceeded on foot over the cracked and heated lava 
rocks toward the brink of this veritable devil's 
caldron. The sulphur fumes are so suffocating that 
it can be approached only on the windward side. 
The first glance into that fearful pit is all that your 
imagination can picture it. You look upon the tra- 
ditional lake of brimstone and fire, and if devils 
were to appear skipping about over the surface with 
pitchforks, turning their victims as the cook turns 
her frying crullers in the sputtering fat, it would 
not much astonish you. This liquid is rather thick 
and viscid, but it is boiling furiously. Great masses 
of it are thrown up forty or fifty feet, and fall with 
a crash like that of the surf upon the shore. Livid 
jets are thrown up many feet high against the sides 
and drip back, cooling quickly as the lava descends. 
We sat or stood upon the brink, at times almost let- 
ting our feet hang over the sides, and shielding our 
faces from the intense heat with paper masks and 
veils. It is probably the only place in the world 
where you can come face to face with the heart of 

152 



HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 

an active volcano. There are no veils of vapor to 
hide it from you. It appears easy enough to cast a 
stone into the midst of it, but none of us could quite 
do it. 

The mass of boiling lava is said to be about one 
and one half acres in extent. Its surface is covered 
with large masses of floating crust, black and 
smooth, like leather or roofing-paper, and between 
these masses, or islands, the molten lava shows in 
broad, vivid lines. It is never quiet. When not 
actually boiling, there is a slow circulatory move- 
ment, and the great flakes of black crust, suggest- 
ing scum, drift across from one end to the other and 
are drawn under the rocks. At one moment only this 
movement is apparent, then suddenly the mass be- 
gins to boil furiously all over the surface, and you 
hear dimly the sound of the bursting bubbles and 
the crash of the falling lava. When this takes place, 
the black floating masses are broken up and scat- 
tered as they are in boiling maple-syrup, but they 
quickly reunite, and are carried on by the current 
as before. 

Looking upon this scene with the thought of the 
traditional lake of fire and brimstone of our fore- 
fathers in mind, you would say that these black, 
filthy-looking masses floating about on the surface 
were the accumulation of all the bad stuff that had 
been fried out of the poor sinners since hell was in- 
vented. How much wickedness and uncharity and 

153 



TIME AND CHANGE 

evil thought it would represent! If the poor victims 
were clarified and made purer by the process, then it 
would seem worth while. 

At the Volcano House they keep a book in which 
tourists write down their impressions of the volcano. 
A distinguished statesman had been there a few days 
before us, and had written a long account of his 
impressions, closing with this oratorical sentence: 
"No pen, however gifted, can describe, no brush, 
however brilliant, can portray, the wonders we have 
been permitted to behold." I could not refrain from 
writing under it, "I have seen the orthodox hell, 
and it's the real thing." 

That huge kettle of molten metal, mantling and 
bubbling, how it is impressed upon my memory! 
It is a vestige of the ancient cosmic fire that once 
wrapped the whole globe in its embrace. It had a 
kind of brutal fascination. One could not take one's 
eyes from it. That network of broad, jagged, fiery 
lines defining those black, smooth masses, or islands, 
of floating matter told of a side of nature we had 
never before seen. We lingered there on the brink 
of the fearful spectacle till night came on, and the 
sides of the mighty caldron, and the fog-clouds 
above it, glowed in the infernal light. Not so white 
as the metal pouring from a blast furnace, not so hot, 
a more sullen red, but welling up from the central 
primordial fires of the earth. This great pot has 
boiled over many times in the recent past, as the 

154 



HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 

lava-beds we traveled over testify, and it will 
probably boil over again. It has been unusually 
active these last few years. 

About nine o'clock we rode back, facing a cold, 
driving mist, the back of each rider, protected by 
the shining yellow "slickers," glowing to the one 
behind him, in the volcano's light, till we were a 
mile or more away. 

The next morning came clear, and the sight of the 
mighty slope of Mauna Loa, lit up by the rising sun, 
was a grand spectacle. It looked gentle and easy of 
ascent, wooded here and there, and here and there 
showing broad, black streaks from the lava over- 
flows at the summit in recent years; but remember- 
ing that it was nearly four thousand feet higher than 
Haleakala, I had no desire to climb it. This moun- 
tain and its companion, Mauna Kea, are the high- 
est island mountains in the world. 

The stage rolled us back through the fern forest 
to the railway station and thence on to Hilo again, 
where in good time, in the afternoon, we went 
aboard the steamer; and the next morning we were 
again in the harbor of Honolulu, glad we had made 
the inter-island trip, and above all glad that we had 
seen Haleakala. 



VI 
THE OLD ICE-FLOOD 



HE was a bold man who first conceived the idea 
of the great continental ' ice-sheet which in 
Pleistocene times covered most of the northern part 
of the continent, and played such a part in shaping 
the land as we know it. That bold man was Agas- 
siz, who, however, was not bold gnough to accept 
the theory of evolution as propounded by Darwin. 
The idea of the great glacier did not conflict with 
Agassiz's religious predilections, and the theory of 
evolution did. It was a bold generalization, this of 
the continental ice-sheet, one of the master-strokes 
of the scientific imagination. It was about the year 
1840 that Agassiz, fresh from the glaciers of the Alps, 
went to Scotland looking for the tracks of the old 
glaciers, and he found them at once when he landed 
near Glasgow. We can all find them now on almost 
every walk we take to the fields and hills; but until 
our eyes are opened, how blind we are to them! 
We are like people who camp on the trail of an 
army and never suspect an army has passed, though 
the ruts made by their wagons and artillery and 

157 



TIME AND CHANGE 

the ruins of their intrenchments are everywhere 
visible. 

When I was a boy on the farm we never asked 
ourselves questions about the stones and rocks that 
encumbered the land — whence they came, or what 
the agency was that brought them. The farmers 
believed the land was created just as we saw it — 
stones, boulders, soil, gravel-pits, hills, mountains, 
and all — and doubtless wished in their hearts 
that the Creator had not been so particular about 
the rocks and stones, or had made an exception 
in favor of their own fields. Rocks and stones were 
good for fences and foundations, and for various 
other uses, but they were a great hindrance to the 
cultivation of the soil. I once heard a farmer boast 
that he had very strong land — it had to be strong 
to hold up such a crop of rocks and stones. When 
the Eastern farmer moved west into the prairie 
states, or south into the cotton-growing states, 
he probably never asked himself why the Creator 
had not cumbered the ground with rocks and stones 
in those sections, as he had in New York and New 
England. South of the line that runs irregularly 
through middle New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, 
Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and so on to the Rockies, 
he will find few loose stones scattered over the soil, 
no detached boulders sitting upon the surface, no 
hills or mounds of gravel and sand, no clay banks 
packed full of rounded stones, little and big, no 

158 



THE OLD ICE-FLOOD 

rocky floors under the soil which look as if they had 
been dressed down by a huge but dulled and nicked 
jack-plane. The reason is that the line I have 
indicated marks the limit of the old ice-sheet which 
more than a hundred thousand years ago covered 
all the northern part of the continent to a depth of 
from two to four thousand feet, and was the chief 
instrument in rounding off mountain-tops, scatter- 
ing rock-fragments, little and big, over our land- 
scapes, grinding down and breaking off the protrud- 
ing rock strata, building up our banks of mingled 
clay and stone, changing the courses of streams and 
rivers, deepening and widening our valleys, trans- 
planting boulders of one formation for hundreds of 
miles, and dropping them upon the surface of an- 
other formation. When it began to melt and re- 
treat, it was the chief agent in building up our river 
terraces, and our long, low, rounded hills of sand 
and gravel and clay, called kames and drumlins. 
In many of our valleys its flowing waters left long, 
low ridges, gentle in outline, made up entirely of 
sand and gravel, or of clay. In other places it left 
moraines made up of earth, gravel, and rock-frag- 
ments that make a very rough streak through the 
farmer's land. All those high, level terraces along 
the Hudson, such as that upon which West Point 
stands, were the work of the old ice-sheet that once 
filled the river valley. The melting ice was also the 
chief agent in building up the enormous clay -banks 

159 



TIME AND CHANGE 

that are found along the shores of the Hudson. 
The clay formed in very still waters, the sand and 
gravel in more active waters. 

This great ice-sheet not only covered our northern 
farms with rocks and stones, and packed the soil 
with rounded boulders, but it also carried away 
much of the rock decay that goes to the making of 
the soil, so that the soil is of greater depth in the 
non-glaciated than in the glaciated areas of the 
country. The New-Englander or New-Yorker in 
traveling in the Southern States may note the enor- 
mous depth of soil as revealed by the water-courses 
or railroad cuts. The ice-sheet was a huge mill that 
ground up the rocks in the North probably as fast 
or faster than the rains and the rank vegetation 
reduced them in the South, but the floods of water 
which it finally let loose carried a great deal of the 
rock-waste into the sea. 

The glacier milk which colors the streams that 
flow from beneath it finally settles and makes clay. 
Off the great Malaspina Glacier in Alaska the ocean is 
tinged by the glacier milk for nearly fifty miles from 
the shores. Very few country people, even among 
the educated, are ready to believe that this enor- 
mous ice-sheet ever existed. To make them believe 
that it is just as much a fact in the physical history 
of this continent as the war of the Revolution is a 
fact in our political history is no easy matter. It 
certainly is a crushing proposition. It so vastly 

160 



THE OLD ICE-FLOOD 

transcends all our experience with ice and snow, or 
the experience of the race since the dawn of history, 
that only the scientific imagination and faith are 
equal to it. The belief in it rests on indubitable evi- 
dence, its record is written all over our landscape, 
but it requires, I say, the scientific imagination to 
put the facts together and make a continuous his- 
tory. 

Three or four hundred feet above my cabin, five 
or six hundred feet above tidewater, there is a bold 
rocky point upon which the old ice-sheet bore heav- 
ily. It has rubbed it down and flattened it as a 
hand passing over a knob of soft putty might do. 
The great hand in this case moved from the north- 
east and must have fairly made this rocky promin- 
ence groan with its weight. The surface, scratched 
and grooved and planed by the ice, has weathered 
away, leaving the rock quite rough; its general out- 
lines alone tell the tale of the battle with the ice. 
But on the east side a huge mass of rock, that had 
been planed and gouged by the glacier, was detached 
and toppled over, turning topsy-turvy before it had 
weathered, and it lies in such a position, upheld 
by two rock fragments, that its glaciated surface, 
though protected from the weather, is clearly visi- 
ble. You step down two or three feet between the 
two upholding rocks and are at the entrance of a 
little cave, and there before you, standing at an 
angle of thirty or forty degrees, is this rocky page 

161 



TIME AND CHANGE 

written over with the history of the passing of the 
great ice plane. The surface exposed is ten or twelve 
feet long, and four or five feet wide, and it is as 
straight and smooth, and the scratches and grooves 
are as sharp and distinct as if made yesterday. I 
often take the college girls there who come to visit 
me, to show them, as I tell them, where the old ice 
gods left their signatures. The girls take turns in 
stooping down and looking along the under surface 
of the rock, and feeling it with their hands, and 
marveling. They have read or heard about these 
things, but the reading or hearing made little im- 
pression upon their minds. When they see a con- 
crete example, and feel it with their hands, they are 
impressed. Then when I tell them that there is not 
a shadow of a doubt but that the ice was at one time 
two or three thousand feet thick above the place 
where they now stand, and that it bore down upon 
Julian's Rock with a weight of thousands of tons to 
the square foot, that it filled all the Hudson River 
Valley, and covered the landscape for thousands of 
miles around them, riding over the tops of the Cat- 
skills and of the Adirondacks, and wearing them 
down and carrying fragments of rock torn from 
them hundreds of miles to the south and southwest, 
— when I have told them all of this, I have usually 
given them a mouthful too big for them to masticate 
or swallow. As a sort of abstract proposition con- 
tained in books, or heard in the classroom, they do 

162 



THE OLD ICE-FLOOD 

not mind it, but as an actual fact, here in the light 
of common day on the hill above Slabsides, with the 
waters of the Hudson glistening below, and the trees 
rustling in the wind all about us, that is quite an- 
other matter. It sounds like a dream or a fable. 
Many of the processes that have made our globe 
what we see it have been so slow and on such a scale 
that they are quite beyond our horizon — beyond 
the reach of our mental apprehension. The mind 
has to approach them slowly and tentatively, and 
become familiar with the idea of them, before it can 
give any sort of rational assent to them. It has 
taken the geologist a long time to work out and 
clear up and confirm this conception of the great 
continental glacier which in Pleistocene times cov- 
ered so large a part of the northern hemisphere. 
It is now as well established as any event in the re- 
mote past well can be. In Alaska, and in the Swiss 
Alps, one may see the ice doing exactly what the 
Pleistocene ice-sheet did over this country. 

ii 

The other day in passing a farmer's house I saw 
where he had placed a huge, roundish boulder, 
nearly as high as a man's head, by the roadside and 
had cut upon it his own name and date, and that of 
his father before him, and that of the first settler 
upon the farm, in the latter part of the eighteenth 
century. It was an interesting monument. I 

163 



TIME AND CHANGE 

learned that the rock had been found in the bed of 
a small creek near by, and that the farmer had given 
a hundred dollars to have it moved to its place in 
front of his house. Had I seen the old farmer I am 
sure I could have added to his interest and pride 
in his monument by telling him that it was Adiron- 
dack gneiss, and had been brought from that region 
on the back, or in the maw, of a glacier, many tens 
of thousands of years ago. But it is highly probable 
that, were he an uneducated man, he would have 
treated my statement with contempt or incredulity. 
Education does at least this for a man: it opens his 
mind and makes him less skeptical about things not 
dreamed of in his philosophy. 

This boulder had been rolled and worn in its long, 
slow ride till it was nearly round. I have a much 
smaller boulder, probably from the same quarry, 
which I planted at the head of my garden for a seat 
when the hoe gets tired. When it was dropped here 
on the land that is now my field, the bed and valley 
of the Hudson were occupied by the old glacier 
which, during its decline and recession, built up 
the terraces opposite me (where now stands a 
multimillionaire's copy of an Italian palace), and 
which added to and uncovered the river slopes where 
now my own vineyards are planted. 

The flowing or the creeping of this old ice-sheet, 
so that it could transport large boulders hundreds 
of miles, is one of the most remarkable things about 

164 



THE OLD ICE-FLOOD 

it: as slow or slower than the hour-hand of the 
clock, yet an actual progression, carrying it, in the 
course of thousands of years, from its apex in 
Labrador well down into New Jersey, where its 
terminal moraine is still clearly traceable. 

A river of ice, under the right conditions, flows as 
literally as a river of water, fastest in the middle, 
and slowest along its margins where the friction is 
greatest. The old ice-sheet, or ice sea, flowed around 
and over mountains as a river flows around and over 
rocks. Where a mountain rose above the glacier, 
the ice divided and flowed round it, and reunited 
again beyond it. One may see all this in Alaska at 
the present time. Water, of course, flows because of 
its own pressure; so does ice, only the pressure has 
to be vastly greater. A drop of water on the table 
does not flow, but, pile it high enough, and it will. 
The old ice sea flowed mainly south, not because it 
was downhill in that direction, but because the 
accumulation of ice and snow at the North was so 
great. If through any climatic changes, the snow- 
fall were ever again to be so great that more snow 
should fall in winter than could melt in summer, 
after the lapse of thousands of years, we should 
have another ice age. 



VII 
THE FRIENDLY SOIL 

I NEVER tire of contemplating the soil itself, the 
mantle rock, as the geologist calls it. It clothes 
the rocky framework of the earth as the flesh clothes 
our bones. It is the seat of the vitality of the globe, 
the youngest part, the growing, changing part. Out 
of it we came, and to it we return. It is literally our 
mother, as the sun is our father. 

The soil ! — the residuum of the rocks, the ashes of 
the mountains. We know what a vast stretch of 
time has gone to the making of it; that it has been 
baked and boiled and frozen and thawed, acted 
upon by sun and star and wind and rain; mixed and 
remixed and kneaded and added to, as the house- 
wife kneads and moulds her bread; that it has lain 
under the seas in the stratified rocks for incalculable 
ages; that chemical and mechanical and vital forces 
have all had a hand in its preparation; that the vast 
cycles of animal and vegetable life of the foreworld 
have contributed to its fertility; that the life of the 
sea, and the monsters of the earth, and the dragons 
of the air, have left their ashes here, so that when I 
stir it with my hoe, or turn it with my spade, I know 

167 



TIME AND CHANGE 

I am stirring or turning the meal of a veritable grist 
of the gods. 

From its primal source in the Archaean rock, up 
through all the vast series of sedimentary rocks to 
our own time, what vicissitudes and transforma- 
tions it has passed through; how many times it has 
died, so to speak, and been reborn from the rocks; 
how many times the winds and the rains have trans- 
ported it, and infused invisible, life-giving gases into 
it; how many of the elements have throbbed with 
life, climbed and bloomed in trees, walked or flown 
or swam in animals, or slumbered for thousands 
upon thousands of years beneath the great ice-sheet 
of Pleistocene time! A handful of the soil by your 
door is probably the most composite thing you can 
find in a day's journey. It may be an epitome of a 
whole geological formation, or of two or more of 
them. If it happens to be made up of decomposed 
limestone, sandstone, slate, and basalt rock, think 
what a history would be condensed in it! 

Our lawns are made up of ashes from the funeral 
pyre of ■ mountains, of dust from the tombs of geo- 
logic ages. What masses of rock does this sandbank 
represent! what an enormous grist in the great 
glacier mill do these layers of clay stand for! Two 
feet of soil probably represent a hundred feet or 
more of rock. Strictly speaking, the soil is the insol- 
uble parts of the ground-up and decomposed rocks, 
after the rains and the winds have done their work 

168 



THE FRIENDLY SOIL 

and taken their toll of the grist they have ground. 
Sometimes these mills take the whole grist and leave 
the rocks bare; but usually they leave a residuum 
in which life strikes its roots. We do not see all that 
the waters take from the soil. They have invisible 
pockets in which they carry away all the more 
soluble parts, such as lime, soda, potash, silica, 
magnesia, and others, and leave for the land the more 
insoluble parts. These, too, in times of flood they 
carry away in suspension, in the shape of sand, silt, 
mud, gravel, and the like. When the waters really 
digest the rocks, they hold the various minerals in 
solution, and run limpid and dancing to the sea; 
when they have an undigested burden, they run 
angry and turbid. 

It is estimated that the Hudson River deposits 
in the sea each year four hundred and forty 
thousand tons of mineral matter in solution which 
it has taken from the land, and the Mississippi one 
hundred and twelve million tons. Each carries 
away about four times as much in suspension. The 
digestive or chemical power of water, then, is only 
about one fourth as great as its mechanical power. 
Between the two the land is made to pay heavy toll 
to the sea. But in time, in geologic time, it all comes 
back. The suspended particles are dropped and go 
to make up the sedimentary rocks, while the solutes 
help cement the material of these rocks together, 
and also nourish the sea life from which limestone 

169 



TIME AND CHANGE 

and other organic rocks are made. When these 
rocks are again lifted to the surface and disinte- 
grated into soil, then the debt of the sea to the land 
is paid. This process, this cycle of soil loss and soil 
growth, has gone on through all time, and must con- 
tinue as long as the rain continues to fall, or as long 
as the sea continues to send its tax-gatherers to the 
land. In this great cycle of give and take of the 
elements, the affairs of men cut but a momentary 
figure; how puny they are, how transient ! How the 
great changes, which in time amount to revolutions, 
go on over our heads and under our feet, and we 
rarely heed them, and are powerless to stay them ! 
A summer shower carries the soil of my side-hill, 
which is mainly disintegrated Silurian rock and 
shale, into the river, and some millions of years 
hence, when it has become stratified rock, and been 
lifted up into the light of day, some other, and, I 
trust, wiser husbandman, will be gathering his har- 
vest from it, and be worried over the downpour 
that robs him of it. The farmer's worry is bound to 
come back with the soil, and be passed along with it. 



VIII 
PRIMAL ENERGIES 

HOW puny and meagre is the utmost power man 
can put forth, even by the aid of all his 
mechanical appliances, when compared with the 
primal earth forces! Think, or try to think, of the 
force of pressure that causes the rock-strata to 
buckle or crumple or bend — layers of rock, thou- 
sands of feet thick, made to fold and bend like the 
leaves of a book — vast mountain-chains flexed and 
foreshortened, or ruptured and faulted as the bend- 
ing of one's body wrinkles or rips one's clothes. 
Think of the over-thrusts and the folding and shear- 
ing of the earth's crust. The shrinking of the earth 
squeezes the rocks to an extent quite beyond our 
power of conception. "So overpowering has been 
the horizontal movement in some cases," says 
Dana, "that masses of rock thousands of feet in 
thickness have been buckled up and sheared, or, 
simply yielding to pressure, have sheared without 
folding, and been thrust forward for miles along a 
gently inclined plane. These great reversed faults 
are termed over-thrusts or thrust-planes. Some- 
times such thrust-planes occur singly, at other times 
the rocks have yielded again and again, great sheets 
having been sliced off successively, and driven for- 

171 



TIME AND CHANGE 

ward one upon the other." In northern Montana 
there is an over-thrust of the Cambrian rocks upon 
the late Cretaceous, of seven or eight miles, carry- 
ing with it what is now called "Chief Mountain/' 
which has been carved out of the extreme end of the 
over-thrust. The contemplation of such things gives 
one a sense of power in Nature beyond anything else 
I know of. The shrinking of the globe as a whole 
makes its rocky garment too big for it, and this 
titanic wrinkling and folding results. When the 
strata snap asunder under the strain, we have earth- 
quakes. During the recent San Francisco earth- 
quake, Mount Tamalpais, across the bay, and all 
the neighboring heights, were permanently shifted 
eight or ten feet. The sides of the mountain, it is 
said, undulated like a curtain. And this shaking 
and twitching of the great rocky skin of the earth 
was vastly less, in proportion to the size of the globe, 
than the twitching and trembling of the skin of a 
horse when he would shake off the flies, in compari- 
son with the animal's body. 

We see another exhibition of the magnitude of the 
earth's forces in what the geologist calls a "lacco- 
lite" — a great cave or cistern deep beneath the 
surface of stratified rock filled with hardened lava. 
The lava is forced up from an unknown depth under 
such pressure that, not finding an outlet at the sur- 
face, the rock strata, hundreds or thousands of feet 
thick, are lifted up and arched like so much paper, 

172 



PRIMAL ENERGIES 

and in the cavity thus formed the pent-up molten 
lava finds relief. These lava cisterns or pockets are 
sometimes uncovered by the process of erosion. 
The Henry Mountains in Utah are all laccolites. 
One of them, Mount Hillers, has a volume of about 
ten cubic miles. Much of the overarching sedimen- 
tary strata still covers it. Geologists read the evi- 
dence of a similar formation called a "sill" on the 
west side of the Hudson in New Jersey, forming the 
Palisades. The lava worked like a giant mole up 
through and then beneath the Triassic sandstone, 
lifting the strata up and arching them over a large 
area. During the millions of years that have elapsed 
since that time, the layers of superincumbent sand- 
stone have been worn away so that now one sees a 
wide, smooth, gentle slope of basaltic rock covered 
by a very thin coat of soil. As one goes by on the 
train, one sees where the workmen of a stone-crush- 
ing plant have cut into the slope and uncovered the 
junction of the two kinds of rock, one born of water, 
and one born of fire. The igneous rock sits squarely 
upon the level sandstone, like a row of upright 
books standing upon a shelf. I never pass the place 
but that I want to stop the train and get out and 
have a close look at the precise spot where this son 
of Vulcan sat down so heavily and so hot upon his 
brother of the sedimentary deposits. 

Probably no two chapters of the earth's history 
differ more than those of the two sides of the Hud- 

173 



TIME AND CHANGE 

son at New York. There is a great break here — 
a leap from Archaean times on the east side to Meso- 
zoic times on the west. The east side is millions 
of years the older. Here is the original Plutonic 
or Azoic rock which apparently has never been un- 
der the sea since it was first thrust up out of the 
fiery depths. The west shore, including the Palisades, 
belongs to a much later geologic era. The original 
granite here is buried under vast deposits of sedi- 
mentary rock of the Triassic age — the age of the 
giant reptiles, the remains of one of which has re- 
cently been found embedded in this sandstone, near 
the river's edge. As the traveler's eye follows along 
the even, almost level line of this escarpment of the 
Palisades, let it re-create for him the strata of the old 
Triassic sandstone that were millions of years ago 
piled high upon it, — how high can only be conject- 
ured, — but which have been removed grain by grain 
under the eroding power of the forces of air and water 
that now seem to caress the huge wall so gently. Ah ! 
geologic Time, what can it not do? what has it not 
done? The old sill of Vulcan now presents a nearly 
vertical front to the Hudson, forming the Palisades, 
showing that some leaves of the earth's history here 
are missing, buried probably beneath the waters of 
the river. There is evidently a line of fault here, 
and the west side has been lifted up out of the old 
Mesozoic seas, probably in the convulsions that 
poured out the lava of the trap rock. 



IX 

SCIENTIFIC FAITH 

I FIND myself accepting certain things on the 
authority of science which so far transcend my 
experience, and the experience of the race and all 
the knowledge of the world, in fact which come so 
near being unthinkable, that I call my acceptance 
of them an act of scientific faith. One's reason may 
be convinced and yet the heart refuse to believe. 
It is not so much a question of evidence as a ques- 
tion of capacity to receive evidence of an unusual 
kind. 

One of the conclusions of science which I feel 
forced to accept, and yet which I find very hard 
work to believe, is that of the animal origin of man. 
I suppose my logical faculties are convinced, but 
what is that in me that is baffled, and that hesitates 
and demurs? 

The idea of the origin of man from some lower 
form requires such a plunge into the past, and such 
a faith in the transforming power of the biological 
laws, and in the divinity that lurks in the soil under- 
foot and streams from the orbs overhead, that the 
ordinary mind is quite unequal to the task. For the 
book of Genesis of the old Bible we have substituted 

175 



TIME AND CHANGE 

the book of genesis of the rocky scripture of the 
globe — a book torn and mutilated, that has been 
through fire and flood and earthquake shock, that 
has been in the sea and on the heights, and that only 
the palaeontologist can read or decipher correctly, 
but which is a veritable bible of the succession of life 
on the earth. The events of the days of creation are 
recorded here, but they are days of such length that 
they are to be reckoned only in millions of years. 

The evolution of the horse, according to the best 
and latest research, from the eohippus of Eocene 
times — a small mammal no larger than the fox — 
to the proud and fleet creature that we prize to-day, 
occupied four or five millions of years. Think of that 
first known progenitor of the horse as never dying, 
but living on through the geological ages and being 
slowly, oh, so slowly, modified by its environment, 
changing its teeth, its hoofs, enlarging its body, 
lengthening its limbs, and so on, till it becomes the 
horse we know to-day. 

In accepting the theory of the animal origin of 
man we have got to follow man back, not only till 
we find him a naked savage like the Fuegians as 
Darwin describes them, — naked, bedaubed with 
paint, with matted hair and looks wild and distrust- 
ful, — but we cannot stop there, we must follow him 
back till he becomes a troglodyte, a cave-dweller, 
contending with the cave bear, the cave lion, and 
the hyena for the possession of this rude shelter; 

176 



SCIENTIFIC FAITH 

back still, till we find him in trees living like the 
anthropoid apes; then back to the earth again to 
some four-footed creature, probably of the marsu- 
pial kind; still the trail leads downward and ever 
downward, till we lose it in that maze of marine 
forms that swarm in the Palaeozoic seas, or until 
the imagination is baffled and refuses to proceed. 
It certainly is a hard proposition, and it puts one 
upon his mettle to accept it. 

Should we not find equal difficulty in believing 
the life-history of each one of us, — the start in the 
germ, then the vague suggestion of fish, and frog, 
and reptile, in our foetal life, — were it not a matter 
of daily experience? Let it be granted that the race 
of man was born as literally out of the animal forms 
below him as the child is born out of these vague, 
prenatal animal forms in its mother's womb. Yet 
the former fact so far transcends our experience, 
and even our power of imagination, that we can 
receive it only by an act of scientific faith, as our 
fathers received the dogmas of the Church by an act 
of religious faith. 

I confess that I find it hard work to get on intimate 
terms with evolution, familiarize my mind with it, 
and make it thinkable. The gulf that separates man 
from the orders below him is so impassable, his intelli- 
gence is so radically different from theirs, and his 
progress so enormous, while they have stood still, 
that believing it is like believing a miracle. 

177 



TIME AND CHANGE 

That the apparently blind groping and experi- 
mentation which mark the course of evolution as re- 
vealed by palaeontology — the waste, the delay, the 
vicissitudes, the hit-and-miss method — should have 
finally resulted in this supreme animal, man, puts 
our scientific faith to the test. In the light of evo- 
lution how the halo with which we have surrounded 
our origin vanishes! 

Man has from the earliest period believed himself 
of divine origin, and by the divine he has meant 
something far removed from this earth and all its 
laws and processes, something quite transcending 
the mundane forces. He has invented or dreamed 
myths and legends to throw the halo of the excep- 
tional, the far removed, the mystical, or the divine 
around his origin. He has spurned the clod with his 
foot; he has denied all kinship with bird and beast 
around him, and looked to the heavens above for the 
sources of his life. And then unpitying science comes 
along and tells him that he is under the same law as 
the life he treads under foot, and that that law is 
adequate to transform the worm into the man; that 
he, too, has groveled in the dust, or wallowed in the 
slime, or fought and reveled, a reptile among rep- 
tiles; that the heavens above him, to which he turns 
with such awe and reverence, or such dread and fore- 
boding, are the source of his life and hope in no other 
sense than they are the source of the life and hope 
of all other creatures. But this is the way of science; 

178 



SCIENTIFIC FAITH 

it enhances the value or significance of everything 
about us that we are wont to treat as cheap or vul- 
gar, and it discounts the value of the things far off 
upon which we have laid such stress. It ties us to the 
earth, it calls in the messengers we send forth into 
the unknown; it makes the astonishing revelation — 
revolutionary revelation, I may say — that the 
earth is embosomed in the infinite heavens the same 
as the stars that shine above us, that the creative 
energy is working now and here underfoot, the same 
as in the ages of myth and miracle; in other words, 
that God is really immanent in his universe, and in- 
separable from it; that we have been in heaven and 
under the celestial laws all our lives, and knew it not. 
Science thus kills religion, poetry, and romance only 
so far as it dispels our illusions and brings us back 
from the imaginary to the common and the near at 
hand. It discounts heaven in favor of earth. It 
should make us more at home in the world, and 
more conscious of the daily beauty and wonders that 
surround us, and, if it does not, the trouble is proba- 
bly in the ages of myth and fable that lie behind us 
and that have left their intoxicating influence in our 
blood. 

We are willing to be made out of the dust of the 
earth when God makes us, the God we have made 
ourselves out of our dreams and fears and aspira- 
tions, but we are not willing to be made out of the 
dust of the earth when the god called Evolution 

179 



TIME AND CHANGE 

makes us. An impersonal law or process we cannot 
revere or fear or worship or exalt; we can only study 
it and put it to the test. We can love or worship 
only personality. This is why science puts such 
a damper upon us; it banishes personality, as we 
have heretofore conceived it, from the universe. 
The thunder is no longer the voice of God, the earth 
is no longer his footstool. Personality appears only 
in man; the universe is not inhuman, but unhuman. 
It is this discovery that we recoil from, and blame 
science for; and until, in the process of time, we 
shall have adjusted our minds, and especially our 
emotions, to it, mankind will still recoil from it. 

We love our dreams, our imaginings, as we love 
a prospect before our houses. We love an outlook 
into the ideal, the unknown in our lives. But we 
love also to feel the solid ground beneath our feet. 

Whether life loses in charm as we lose our illusions, 
and whether it gains in power and satisfaction as we 
more and more reach solid ground in our beliefs, is 
a question that will be answered differently by differ- 
ent persons. 

We have vastly more solid knowledge about the 
universe amid which we live than had our fathers, 
but are we happier, better, stronger? May it not 
be said that our lives consist, not in the number of 
things we know any more than in the number of 
things we possess, but in the things we love, in the 
depth and sincerity of our emotions, and in the ele- 

180 



SCIENTIFIC FAITH 

vation of our aspirations? Has not science also en- 
larged the sphere of our love, and given us new 
grounds for wonder and admiration? It certainly 
has, but it as certainly has put a damper upon our 
awe, our reverence, our veneration. However val- 
uable these emotions are, and whatever part they 
may have played in the development of character 
in the past, they seem doomed to play less and 
less part in the future. Poetry and religion, so 
called, seem doomed to play less and less part in the 
life of the race in the future. We shall still dream 
and aspire, but we shall not tremble and worship 
as in the past. 

We see about us daily transformations as stu- 
pendous as that of the evolution of man from the 
lower animals, and we marvel not. We see the inor- 
ganic pass into the organic, we see iron and lime and 
potash and silex blush in the flowers, sweeten in the 
fruit, ripen in the grain, crimson in the blood, and 
we marvel not. We see the spotless pond-lily rising 
and unfolding its snowy petals, and its trembling 
heart of gold, from the black slime of the pond. We 
contemplate our own life-history as shown in our 
pre-natal life, and we are not disturbed. But when 
we stretch this process out through the geologic ages 
and try to see ourselves a germ, a fish, a reptile, in 
the womb of time, we are balked. We do not see the 
great mother, or the great father, or feel the lift of the 
great biologic laws. We are beyond our depth. It 

181 



TIME AND CHANGE 

is easy to believe that the baby is born of woman, 
because it is a matter of daily experience, but it is 
not easy to believe that man is born of the animal 
world below hinr, and that that is born of inorganic 
Nature, because the fact is too big and tremendous. 

What we call Nature works in no other way; one 
law is over big and little alike. What Nature does 
in a day typifies what she does in an eternity. It is 
when we reach the things done on such an enormous 
scale of time and power and size that we are helpless. 
The almost infinitely slow transformations that the 
theory of evolution demands balk us as do the size 
and distance of the fixed stars. 

No observation or study of evolution on a small 
scale and near at hand in the familiar facts of the 
life about us can prepare us for it, any more than lake 
and river can prepare us for the ocean, or the model- 
ing of miniature valleys and mountains by the rain 
in the clay bank can open our minds to receive the 
tremendous facts of the carving of the face of the 
continent by the same agents. 

We do not see evolution working in one day, or in 
a century, or in many centuries. Neither do we 
catch the gods of erosion at their Herculean tasks. 
They always seem to be having a holiday, or else to 
be merely toying with their work. 

When we see a mound of earth or a bank of clay 
worn into miniature mountain-chains and canons 
and gulches by the rains of a season, we do not 

182 



SCIENTIFIC FAITH 

doubt our eyes; we know the rains did it. But when 
we see the same thing copied in a broad landscape, 
or on the face of a state or a continent, we find it 
hard to believe the evidence of our own senses. The 
scale upon which it is done, and the time involved, 
put it so far beyond the sphere of our experience 
that something in us, probably the practical, every- 
day man, refuses to be convinced. 

The lay mind can hardly have any adequate con- 
ception of the part erosion, the simple weathering 
of the rocks, has played in shaping our landscapes, 
and in preparing the earth for the abode of man. 
The changes in the surface of the land in one's life- 
time, or even in the historic period, are so slight 
that the tales the geologists tell us are incredible. 

When, during a recent trip through the great 
Southwest, I saw the earth laid open by erosion as 
I had never before dreamed of, especially when I 
visited those halls of the gods, the Grand Canon 
and Yosemite Valley, I found my capacity to believe 
in the erosive power of water and the weather quite 
overtaxed. It must be true, I said, what the geol- 
ogists tell us, that water and air did all this; but 
while you look and wait, and while generations 
before you have looked and waited, all is as quiet 
and passive as if the slumber of ages wrapped hill 
and vale. Invisible giants have wrought and delved 
here of whom we never catch a glimpse, nor shall we, 
wait and watch we never so long. No sound of their 

183 



TIME AND CHANGE 

hammers or picks or shovels or of the dynamite ever 
breaks the stillness of the air. 

I have to believe that the valleys and mountains 
of my native Catskills were carved out of a great 
elevated plain or plateau; there is no other explan- 
ation of them. Here lie the level strata, without any 
bending or folding, or sign of convulsion and up- 
heavals, horizontal as the surface of the sea or lake 
in which their sediments were originally laid down; 
and here are these deep, wide valleys cut down 
through these many sheets of stratified rock; and 
here are these long, high, broad-backed mountains, 
made up of the rock that the forces of air and water 
have left, and with no forces of erosion at work 
that would appreciably alter a line of the landscape 
in ten thousand years; and yet we know, if we know 
anything about the physical history of the earth, 
that erosion has done this work, carved out these 
mountains and valleys, from the Devonian strata, 
as literally as the sculptor carves his statue from the 
block of marble. 

Above my lodge on the home farm the vast lay- 
ers of the gray, thin-sheeted Catskill rock crop out 
and look across the valley to their fellows two or 
more miles away where they crop out in a similar 
manner "on the opposite slope of the mountain. 
With the eye of faith I see the great sheets restored, 
and follow them across on the line which they made 
aeons ago, till they are joined again to their fellows 

184 



SCIENTIFIC FAITH 

as they were before the agents of erosion had so 
widely severed them. 

These physical forces have worked as slowly and 
silently in sculpturing the landscapes as the biolo- 
gical laws have worked in evolving man from the 
lower animals, or the vertebrates from the inverte- 
brates. The rains, the dews, the snows, the winds 
— how could these soft, gently careering agents have 
demolished these rocks and dug these valleys? One 
would almost as soon expect the wings and feet of 
the birds to wear away the forests they flit through. 
The wings of time are feathered also, and as they 
brush against the granite or the flinty sandstone no 
visible particle is removed while you watch and 
wait. Come back in a thousand years, and you note 
no change, save in the covering of trees and verdure. 
Return in ten thousand, and you would probably 
find the hills carrying their heads as high and as 
proudly as ever. Here and there the face of the cliff 
may have given way, or a talus slid into the valley, 
or a stream or river changed its course, or sawed 
deeper into the rock, and a lake been turned into a 
marsh, or the delta of a river broadened — minor 
changes, such as a shingle from your roof or a brick 
from your chimney, while your house stands as be- 
fore. In one hundred thousand years what changes 
should we probably find? Here in the Catskills, 
where I write, the weathering of the hills and moun- 
tains would probably have been but slight. It must 

185 



TIME AND CHANGE 

be fifty thousand years or more since the great ice- 
sheet left us. Where protected by a thin coat of soil, 
its scratches and grooves upon the surface rock are 
about as fresh and distinct as you may see them 
made in Alaska at the present time. Where the 
rock is exposed, they have weathered out, one eighth 
of an inch probably having been worn away. The 
drifting of the withered leaves of autumn, or of the 
snows of winter over them, it really seems, would 
have done as much in that stretch of time. Then try 
to fancy the eternity it has taken the subaerial ele- 
ments to cut thousands of feet through this hard 
Catskill sandstone! No, the evolution of the land- 
scape, the evolution of the animal and vegetable 
kingdoms, the evolution of the suns and planets, 
involve a process so slow, and on such a scale, that 
it is quite unthinkable. How long it took evolution 
to bridge the chasm between the vertebrate and the 
invertebrate, between the fish and the frog, between 
the frog and the reptile, between the reptile and the 
mammal, or between the lowest mammal and the 
highest, who can guess? 

But the gulf has been passed, and here we are in 
this teeming world of life and beauty, with a terrible 
past behind us, but a brighter and brighter future 
before us. 



X 

"THE WORM STRIVING TO BE MAN" 

WHEN our minds have expanded sufficiently 
to take in and accept the theory of evo- 
lution, with what different feelings we look upon 
the visible universe from those with which our fa- 
thers looked upon it ! Evolution makes the universe 
alive. In its light we see that mysterious potency 
of matter itself, that something in the clod under 
foot that justifies Emerson's audacious line of the 
"worm striving to be man." We are no longer the 
adopted children of the earth, but her own real off- 
spring. Evolution puts astronomy and geology in 
our blood and authenticates us and gives us the 
backing of the whole solar system. This is the re- 
demption of the earth : it is the spiritualization of 
matter. 

In imagination stand off in vacant space and see 
the earth rolling by you, a huge bubble with all its 
continents and seas and changing seasons and count- 
less forms of life upon it, and remember that you are 
looking upon a great cosmic organism, pulsing with 
the vital currents of the universe, and that what 
it holds of living forms were not arbitrarily imposed 

187 



TIME AND CHANGE 

upon it from without, but vitally evolved from 
within and that man himself is one of its products 
as literally as are the trees that stand rooted to the 
soil. Revert to the time when life was not, when the 
globe was a half-incandescent ball, or when it was a 
seething, weltering waste of heated water, before 
the land had yet emerged from the waves, and yet 
you and I were there in the latent potencies of the 
chemically and dynamically warring elements. We 
were there, the same as the heat and flame are in the 
coal and wood and as the explosive force of powder 
is in the grains. The creative cosmic chemistry in 
due time brought us forth, and started us on the long 
road that led from the amoeba up to man. There 
have been no days of creation. Creation has been a 
continuous process, and the creator has been this 
principle of evolution inherent in all matter. 

Man himself was born of this principle. His 
genealogy finally runs back to the clod under his 
feet. One has no trouble in accepting the old Bibli- 
cal account of his origin from the dust of the earth 
when one views that dust in the light of modern 
science. 

Man is undoubtedly of animal origin. He is em- 
braced in the same zoological scheme as are all other 
creatures, and did not start as man any more than 
you and I started with our present stature, or than 
the earth sprang from chaos as we now behold it. 

His complete physical evolution must have been 
188 



THE WORM STRIVING TO BE MAN 

achieved thousands of centuries ago, but his full 
mental and spiritual evolution is not yet. 

I think of his physical evolution as completed 
when he assumed the upright attitude or passed 
from a quadruped to a biped, which must of itself 
have been a long, slow process. Probably our whole 
historic period would form but a fraction of this 
cycle of unrecorded time. Man's complete emer- 
gence from the lower orders, so that he stood off in 
sharp contrast to them in his physical form probably 
occurred in later Tertiary times, and what the mean- 
ing of this stretch of time is in human years we can 
only conjecture. During this cycle of numberless 
millenniums till the dawn of history, man's develop- 
ment was mainly mental. He left the brute crea- 
ture behind because his mind continued to develop 
after his physical form was complete, while the brute 
stood still. Whence the impulse that sent man for- 
ward? Why was one animal form endowed with the 
capacity for endless growth and development, and 
all the others denied it? Ah! that is the question of 
questions. Compared with the development of his 
bodily powers, man's mental and spiritual growth 
has been very rapid. He seems to have been mil- 
lions of years in getting his body, while he has been 
only millenniums in getting his reason and intelli- 
gence. What progress since the dawn of history! 
Compare the Germans of the time of Tacitus, or the 
Gauls of the time of Caesar, or the Britons of the 

189 



TIME AND CHANGE 

time of Hadrian with the people of those countries 
to-day. 

We are prone to speak of man's emergence from 
the lower orders as if it were a simple thing, almost 
like the going from one country into another. But 
try to think what it means; try to think of the slow 
transformation, of the long, toilsome road even 
from the halfway house of our simian ancestors. 
If we do not give him the benefit of the sudden 
mutation theory of the origin of species, then think 
of the slow process, hair by hair, as it were, by which 
a tailed, apelike arboreal animal was transformed 
into a hairless, tailless, erect, tool-using, fire-using, 
speech-forming animal. We see in our own day in 
the case of the African negro, that centuries of our 
Northern climate have hardly any appreciable effect 
toward making a white man of him; nor, on the other 
hand, has exposure to the tropical sun had much 
more effect in making a negro of the white man. 
Probably it would take ten thousand years or more 
of these conditions to bleach the pigments out of the 
one skin and put them in the other. There is con- 
vincing proof from painting and figures found in 
Egypt that neither the African negro nor the 
Egyptian has changed in features in five thousand 
years. 

The most marvelous thing about man's evolu- 
tion is the inborn upward impulse in some one low 
organism that rested not till it reached its goal in 

190 



THE WORM STRIVING TO BE MAN 

him. The mollusk remains, but some impulse went 
out from the mollusk that begat the fish. The fish 
remains, but some impulse went out from the fish 
that begat the amphibian. The amphibian remains, 
but some impulse went out from the amphibian that 
begat the reptile. The reptile remains, but some 
impulse went out from the reptile that begat the 
mammal; and so on up to man. Man must have had 
a specific line of descent. One golden thread must 
connect him with the lowest forms of life. And the 
wonder is that this golden thread was never snapped 
or lost through all the terrible vicissitudes of the geo- 
logic ages. But I suppose it is just as great a wonder 
that the line of descent of the horse, or the sheep, or 
the dog, or the bird, was not snapped or lost. Some 
impulse or tendency was latent or potential in the 
first unicellular life that rested not till it eventuated 
in each of these higher forms. Did any terrestrial or 
celestial calamity endanger the line of descent of 
any of the higher creatures? Was any form cut off 
in the world-wide crustal disturbances of the earth 
at the end of palaeozoic and mesozoic time, when so 
many forms of animal life appear to have been 
wiped out, that might in time have given birth to a 
kind unlike or superior to any now upon the earth? 
Species after species have become extinct, whole 
orders and families have gone out, often rather sud- 
denly. Why we know not. Why the line of man's 
descent was not cut off, who knows? It is a vain 

191 



TIME AND CHANGE 

speculation. There can be little doubt that in early- 
Tertiary times our ancestor was a small, feeble 
mammal, maybe of the lemur, maybe of the mar- 
supial kind, powerless before the great carnivorous 
mammals of that time, and probably escaping them 
by his greater agility, perhaps by his arboreal habits. 
The ancestor of the horse was also a small creature 
at that time, not larger than a fox. It was not cut 
off; the line of descent seems complete to the horse 
of our day. Small beginnings seem to be the rule in 
all provinces of life. There is little doubt that the 
great animals of our day — the elephant, the whale, 
the lion, — all had their start in small forms. Many 
of these small forms have been found. But a com- 
plete series of any of the animal forms that eventu- 
ated in any of the dominant species is yet wanting. 
It is quite certain that the huge, the gigantic, the 
monstrous in animal, as in vegetable life, lies far be- 
hind us. Is it not quite certain that evolution in the 
life of the globe has run its course, and that it will 
not again bring forth reptiles or mammals of the 
terrible proportions of those of past geologic ages? 
nor ferns, nor mosses, nor as gigantic trees as those 
of Carboniferous times? Probably the redwoods of 
the Far West, the gigantic sequoias, are the last race 
of gigantic trees. The tide of life of the globe is un- 
doubtedly at the full. The flood has no doubt been 
checked many times. The glacial periods, of which 
there seem to have been several in different parts 

192 



THE WORM STRIVING TO BE MAN 

of the earth, and in different geological periods, no 
doubt checked it when it occurred. But the tide as a 
whole must have steadily risen, because the progres- 
sion from lower to higher forms has gone steadily 
forward. The lower forms have come along; Nature 
has left nothing behind. The radiates, the articu- 
lates, the mollusca, are still with us, but in the 
midst of these the higher and higher forms have 
been constantly appearing. The great biological 
tree has got its growth. Many branches and twigs 
have died and dropped off, and many more will do 
so, are doing so before our eyes, but I cannot help 
doubting that any new branches of importance are 
yet to appear — any new families or orders of birds, 
or fishes, or reptiles, or mammals. The horse, the 
stag, the sheep, the dog, the cat, as we know them, 
are doubtless the end of the series. One arrives at 
this conclusion upon general principles. Life as a 
whole must run its course or reach its high-water 
mark, the same as life in its particular phases. Man 
has arrived and has universal dominion; all things 
are put under his feet. The destiny of life upon the 
globe is henceforth largely in his hands. Not even 
he can avert the final cosmic catastrophe which 
physicists foresee, and which, according to Pro- 
fessor Lowell, the beings upon Mars are now strug- 
gling to ward off. 

Man has taken his chances in the clash of forces 
of the physical universe. No favor has been shown 

193 



TIME AND CHANGE 

him, or is shown him to-day, and yet he has come 
to his estate. He has never been coddled; fire, water, 
frost, gravity, hunger, death, have made and still 
make no exceptions in his favor. He is on a level 
with all other animals in this respect. He has his life 
and well-being on the same terms as do the fowls of 
the air and the beasts of the fields. 

Archbishop Whately thought that primitive man 
could never have raised himself to a higher con- 
dition without external aid — some "elementary 
instruction to enable his faculties to begin their 
work." He must have had a boost. Well, the boost 
was forthcoming, but it was not from without, but 
from within, through this principle of development, 
this upward striving that was innate from the first 
in certain forms of life and of which Whately had 
no conception. It was the conception of his time 
that creation was like a watch made and wound up 
by some power external to itself. 

The physical evolution of man, as I have said, 
is no doubt complete. He will never have wings, or 
more legs, or longer arms, or a bigger brain. The 
wings and the extra legs and the keener sense he has 
left behind him. His development henceforth must 
be in the mental and spiritual. He is bound to have 
more and more dominion over Nature, and see more 
and more clearly his own relation to her. He will 
in time completely subdue and possess the earth. 
Yes, and probably exhaust her? But he will see in 

194 



THE WORM STRIVING TO BE MAN 

time that he is squandering his inheritance and will 
mend his ways. He will conserve in the future as he 
has wasted in the past. He will learn to conserve 
his own health. He will banish disease; he will 
stamp out all the plagues and scourges, through his 
scientific knowledge; he will double or treble the 
length of life. Man has undoubtedly passed through 
and finished certain phases of his emotional and 
mental development. He will never again be the 
religious enthusiast and fanatic he has been in the 
past; he has not worshiped his last, but he has 
worshiped his best. He will build no more cathe- 
drals; he will burn no more martyrs at the stake. 
His religion as such is on the wane. But his humani- 
tarianism is a rising tide. He is becoming less and 
less a savage, revolts more and more at the sight of 
blood and suffering. The highly religious ages were 
ages of blood and persecution. Man's tenderness for 
man has vastly increased. The sense of the sacred- 
ness of human life has increased as his faith in his 
gods has declined. He has grown more human as he 
has grown less superstitious. Science has atrophied 
his faith, but it has softened his heart. His fear of 
Nature has given place to love. Man never loved as 
he does now. He has withdrawn his gaze from hea- 
ven and fixed it upon the earth. As his interest in 
other worlds has diminished, his interest in this has 
increased. As the angels have departed, the child- 
ren have come in. 

195 



TIME AND CHANGE 

When the nations, too, cease to be savage and 
selfish, and become altruistic, then the new birth of 
humanity will actually have occurred. As an artist 
and a creator of beautiful forms, man has also had 
his day; he loved the beautiful, the artistic, or the 
ornamental long before he loved the true and the 
just. He was proud before he was kind; he was chiv- 
alrous before he was decent; he was tattooed before 
he was washed; he was painted before he was 
clothed; he built temples before he built a home; 
he sacrificed to his gods before he helped his neigh- 
bor; he was heroic before he was self-denying; he 
was devout before he was charitable. We are losing 
the savage virtues and vanities and growing in the 
grace of all the humanities, and this process will 
doubtless go on, with many interruptions and set- 
backs of course, till the kingdom of love is at last 
fairly established upon the earth. 



XI 
THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 



I TAKE the title of this paper from those great 
lines in Whitman beginning — 

M Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me" — 

in which he launches in vivid imaginative form 
the whole doctrine of evolution some years before 
Darwin had published his epoch-making work on 
the "Origin of Species." 

" I see afar down the huge first Nothing, and I know I was even 
there." 

I do not know that Whitman had any concrete 
belief in the truth of the animal origin of man. He 
read as picture and parable that which the man of 
science reads as demonstrable fact. He saw and felt 
the great truth of evolution, but he saw it as written 
in his own heart and not in the great stone book of 
the earth, and he saw it written large. He felt its 
cosmic truth, its truth in relation to the whole 
scheme of things; he felt his own kinship with all 
that lives, and had a vivid personal sense of his debt* 
to the past, not only of human history, but also to 
the past of the earth and the spheres. And he felt 
this as a poet and not as a man of science. 

197 



TIME AND CHANGE 

The theory of evolution as applied to the whole 
universe and its inevitable corollary, the animal 
origin of man, is now well established in most of the 
leading minds of the world, but it is still rejected by 
many timid and sensitive souls, and it will be a long 
time before it becomes universally accepted. 

Doubtless one source of the trouble we have in 
accepting the theory comes from the fact that our 
minds have not been used to such thoughts; in the 
mind of the race they are a new thing: they are not 
in the literature nor in the philosophy nor in the 
sacred books in which our minds have been nurtured; 
they are of yesterday; they came to us raw and un- 
hallowed by the usage of ages; more than that, they 
savor of the materialism of all modern science, 
which is so distasteful to our finer ideals and religious 
sensibilities. In fact, these ideas are strangers of an 
alien race in our intellectual household, and we look 
upon them coldly and distrustfully. But probably 
to our children, or to our children's children, they will 
wear quite a different countenance; they will have 
become an accepted part of the great family of ideas 
of the race. 

Another hindrance is the dullness and opacity of 
our own minds. We are slow to wake up to a sense 
of the divinity that hedges us about. The great 
office of science has been to show us this universe as 
much more wonderful and divine than we have been 
wont to believe; shot through and through with celes- 

198 



THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 

tial laws and forces; matter, indeed, but matter in- 
formed with spirit and intelligence; the creative 
energy inherent and active in the ground underfoot 
not less than in the stars and nebulae overhead. 

We look for the divine afar off. We gaze upon the 
beauty and purity of the heavenly bodies without 
thinking that we are also in the heavens. We must 
open our minds to the stupendous fact that God is 
immanent in his universe and that it is literally and 
exactly true, as we were taught long ago, that, during 
every moment of our lives, in Him we live and move 
and have our being. 

Moreover, we are staggered by the element of vast 
time that is implied in the history of development. 
Were it not for the records in the rocks, we could not 
believe it at all. All the grand movements and pro- 
cesses of nature are quite beyond our ken. In the 
heavens only the astronomer with his prisms and 
telescopes traces them; only the geologist and palae- 
ontologist read their history in the earth's crust. 
The soil we cultivate was once solid rock, but not 
in one lifetime, not in many lifetimes, do we see the 
transformation of the rocks into soil. Nations may 
rise and fall, and the rocks they looked upon and the 
soil they tilled remain practically unchanged. Geo- 
logists talk about the ancient continents that have 
passed away. What an abyss of time such things 
open! They talk about the birth of a mountain or 
the decay of a mountain as we talk of the birth 

199 



TIME AND CHANGE 

and death of a man, but in doing so they reckon 
with periods of time for which we have no standards 
of measurement. They walk and talk with the 
Eternal. To us the mountains seem as fixed as the 
stars. But the stars, too, are flitting. Look at Orion 
some millions of years hence, and he will have been 
torn limb from limb. The combination of stars that 
forms that striking constellation and all other con- 
stellations is temporary as the grouping of the clouds. 
The rise of man from the lower orders implies a scale 
of time almost as great. It is unintelligible to us be- 
cause it belongs to a category of facts that tran- 
scends our experience and the experience of the race 
as the interstellar spaces transcend our earthly meas- 
urements. 

We now gaze upon the order below us across an 
impassable gulf, but that gulf we have crossed and 
without any supernatural means of transportation. 
We may say it has been bridged or filled with the 
humble ancestral forms that carried forward the 
precious evolutionary impulse of the vertebrate 
series till it culminated in man. All vestiges of that 
living bridge are now gone, and the legend of our 
crossing seems like a dream or a miracle. Biological 
evolution has gone hand in hand with geological 
evolution, and both are on a scale of time of which 
our hour-glass of the centuries gives us but a faint 
hint. Our notions of time are not formed on the 
pattern of the cosmic processes, or the geologic 

200 



THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 

processes, or the evolutionary processes; they are 
formed on the pattern of our own brief span of life. 
In a few cases in the familiar life about us we see the 
evolutionary process abridged, and transformations 
like those of unrecorded time take place before our 
eyes, as when the tadpole becomes the frog or the 
grub becomes the butterfly. These rapid changes 
are analogous to those which in the depths of geo- 
logic time have evolved the bird from the fish or the 
reptile, or the seal and the manatee from a four- 
footed land animal. Our common bluebird has long 
been recognized as a descendant of thethrushfamily ; 
this origin is evident in the speckled breast of the 
young birds and in the voices of the mature birds. 
I have heard a bluebird with an unmistakable thrush 
note. The transformation has doubtless been so 
slow that an analogous change taking place in any 
of the bird forms of our own time would entirely 
escape observation. The bluebird may have been 
as long in getting his blue coat as man has been in 
getting his upright position. 

Looking into the laws and processes of the com- 
mon nature about us for clues to the origin of man 
is not unlike looking into the records of the phono- 
graph for the secret of the music which that won- 
derful instrument voices for us. Something, some 
active principle or agent, has to invoke the music 
that slumbers or is latent in these lines. 

In like manner some principle or force that we 
201 



TIME AND CHANGE 

do not see is active in the ground underfoot and in 
the forms of life about us which is the final secret of 
the origin of man and of all other creatures. This 
something is the evolutionary impulse, this innate 
aspiration of living matter to reach higher and 
higher forms. "Urge and urge," says Whitman, 
"always the procreant urge of the world." It is in 
Emerson's worm "striving to be man." This "striv- 
ing" pervades organic nature. Whence its origin 
science does not assume to say. 1 

Then the difference in kind between the mind of 
man and that of the lower orders makes evolution 
a doubly hard problem. 

Look over the globe and see what a gulf separates 
man from all other creatures. All the other animals 
seem akin — as if the product of the same workman. 
Man, in contrast, seems like an introduction from 
some other sphere or the outcome of quite other 
psychological laws; his dominion over them all is 
so complete and universal. Without their special- 
ization of structure or powers, he yet masters them 
all and uses them; without their powers of speed, 
he yet outstrips them; without their strength of 
tusk and limb, he yet subdues them; without their 
inerrant instinct, he yet outwits them; without their 
keenness of eye, ear, and nose, he yet wins in the 

1 This passage was written long before I had read Bergson's 
Creative Evolution, as were several others of the same import in 
this volume. 



THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 

chase; without their special adaptation to environ- 
ment, he survives when they perish. A man is 
marked off from the animals below him, I say, as if 
he were a being of another sphere. He looks into 
their eyes and they into his, and no recognition 
passes; and yet we have to believe that he and they 
are fruit of the same biologic tree and that their 
stem forms unite in the same trunk somewhere in 
the abyss of biologic time. 

The rise of man from the lower orders taxes our 
powers of belief and our faith in the divinity that 
lurks underfoot far more than did the special crea- 
tion myth. Creation by omnipotent fiat seems easy 
when you have the omnipotent being to begin with, 
but creation through evolution is a kind of cosmic 
or biologic legerdemain that baffles and bewilders 
us. It so far transcends all our earthly knowledge 
and experience and all the flights of our philosophy 
that we stand speechless before it. It opens a gulf 
that the imagination cannot clear; it opens vistas 
from which we instinctively shrink; it opens up 
abysms of time in which our whole historic period 
would be but a day; it opens up a world of struggle, 
delay, waste, failure that palls the imagination. It 
challenges our faith in the immanency and in the 
ceaseless activity of God in his world; it brings the 
creative energy down from its celestial abode and 
clothes it with the flesh and blood of animal life. 
It may chill and shock us; it shows us that we are 

203 



TIME AND CHANGE 

of the earth earthy; yea, that we are of the animal 
beastly; it presses us down in matter; it puts out the 
lights to which we have so long turned as lighting 
our origin; the words "sacred," "divine," "holy," 
and "celestial," as applied to our origin and devel- 
opment, we have no longer any use for, nor for any 
words or ideas that set us apart from the rest of 
creation — above it in our origin or apart from it in 
our relations. The atmosphere of mystery and mir- 
acle and sanctity that our religious training has 
thrown around our introduction upon this planet 
and around our relations and destiny science dispels. 
Our language and many of our ideas and habits of 
thought date back to pre-scientific times — when 
there were two worlds, the heavenly and the earthly, 
separated by a gulf. Now we know that the two 
worlds are one, that they are inseparably blended; 
that the celestial and the terrestrial are under the 
same law; that we can never be any more in the hea- 
vens than we are here and now, nor any nearer the 
final sources of life and power; that the divine is 
underfoot as well as overhead; that we are part and 
parcel of the physical universe, and take our chances 
in the cosmic processes the same as the rest, and 
draw upon the same fund of animal life that the 
other creatures do. We are identified with the 
worm underfoot no less than with the stars over- 
head. We are not degraded by such a thought, but 
the whole of creation is lifted up. Our minds and 

204 



THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 

bodies are not less divine, but all things are more 
divine. We have to gird up our loins and try to 
summon strength to see this tremendous universe 
as it is, alive and divine to the last particle and em- 
bosomed in the Infinite. 



Evolution is not the final explanation of the uni- 
verse, but it is probably the largest generalization 
of the modern mind. Science has to start some- 
where, and it starts with the universe as it finds it 
and seeks to trace secondary or proximate causes; 
the evolutionist seeks to trace the footsteps of cre- 
ative energy in the world of animal life. How did 
God make man? Out of the dust of the earth, says 
the Bible of our fathers. The evolutionist teaches 
essentially the same thing, only he does not abridge 
the process as the catechism has abridged it for us; 
he would fain unfold the whole long road that man 
has traveled from the first protozoic cell to the vast 
communities of cells that now make up his physical 
life. He would show how man has risen on stepping- 
stones of his dead self. These stepping-stones have 
been the animal forms below him. In them and 
through them something, some impulse, some force, 
has mounted and mounted through all the enormous 
lapse of geologic time. In imagination we see the 
dim, shadowy man, restless and struggling in a vast 
number of earlier forms. He has struggled up- 

205 



TIME AND CHANGE 

ward through the invertebrates, through the fish, 
through the reptile, through the lower mammals, 
through his simian ancestors till he reaches his goal 
in the man we know. 

Darwin was not the author of the theory of evolu- 
tion, but he made the theory alive and real to the 
imagination. He showed us what a master key it is 
for unlocking the riddle of the life of the globe. 
He launched biological science upon a new career 
and made it worthy of its place in the great trilogy 
of sciences, astronomy, geology, and biology, of 
which Tennyson, in his poem "Parnassus," recog- 
nized only the first two. Had Tennyson written his 
poem in our day he would undoubtedly have in- 
cluded biology among his "terrible Muses" that 
tower above all others, eclipsing the glory of the 
great poets. Or is it true that we find it easier to 
accept the theory of the evolution of the worlds and 
suns from nebulous matter than to accept the theory 
of the evolution of man from the maze of the lower 
animal forms? It is less personal to us. The astro- 
nomer has the advantage of the biologist in one im- 
portant respect: he can show us in the heavens now 
the process of the evolution of worlds actually 
going on, but the biologist cannot show us the trans- 
formation of one species into another taking place 
to-day. We can sound the abysses of astronomic 
space easier than we can sound the abysses of geo- 
logic time. The stars and the nebulae we have 

206 



THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 

always with us, but where are the myriad earlier 
forms that were the antecedents of the present animal 
life of the globe? True, the palaeontologist finds a 
more or less disjointed record of them in the strati- 
fied rocks and sees in a measure the course evolu- 
tion has taken, but he does not actually see it at 
work as does the astronomer. More than that, the 
forces the astronomer deals with are mechanical 
and chemical, but the biologist deals with a new 
force called life that often reverses or defies me< 
chanical and chemical forces, but which is yet so 
identified and blended with them that we cannot 
conceive it apart from them. The stomach does not 
digest itself, nor gravity hold the blood in the lower 
extremities. The tree lifts up its weight of fluids 
and solids and holds aloft its fruit and foliage in 
spite of gravity; its growing roots split and lift the 
rocks; mosses and lichens disintegrate granite; vital 
energy triumphs over chemical and mechanical 
energy. 

Biological laws are much more subtle and difficult 
to trace and formulate than chemical and mechani- 
cal laws. Hence the student of organic evolution 
can rarely arrive at the demonstrable certainties in 
this field that he can in the sphere of chemistry and 
mechanics. It is very doubtful if life can ever be 
explained in terms of these things. Life works 
through chemical combinations and affinities, and 
yet is it not more than chemistry? It works with 

207 



TIME AND CHANGE 

and through mechanical principles and forces, and 
yet it is evidently more than mechanics. It is mani- 
fested through matter, and yet no analysis of matter 
can reveal its secret. It comes and goes while mat- 
ter stays; we destroy life, but cannot destroy mat- 
ter. It is as fugitive as the wind which fills all sails 
one minute and is gone the next. It avails itself of 
fluids and gases and the laws which govern them, 
but fluids and gases do not explain it. It waits 
upon the rains and the dews, but it is more than 
they are; it follows in the footsteps of the decay and 
disintegration of the inorganic, and yet it is not the 
gift of these things; it transforms the face of the 
earth, and yet the earth has been and will be when 
it was not and when it will not be. Through his 
knowledge and his science man performs wonders 
every day; he can reduce mountains to powder and 
seas to dry land, but he cannot create or start de novo 
the least throb of life. At least, he has not yet done 
so. With all his vast resources of mechanics and 
chemistry, and his insight into the mechanism of 
the universe, he has not yet made the least particle 
of inorganic matter thrill with the mysterious some- 
thing we call life. 

There must have been a time when life was not 
upon the earth and there must again come a time 
when it will not be. It has probably vanished from 
the moon and all inferior planets, and it has not 
yet come to the superior planets, except maybe to 

208 



THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 

Mars. It must be and must have always been po- 
tential in matter, but this fact leaves the mystery 
as profound as ever. 

Yet if the artificial production of life were to 
happen to-day — if in some of our laboratories liv- 
ing matter were produced from non-living, should 
we not still have to credit the event to some mysteri- 
ous potency residing in matter itself? If by a lucky 
stroke man were to evoke the organic from the inor- 
ganic, be assured he would not evoke something 
from nothing, or add anything to the latent possi- 
bilities of the elements with which he works. Does 
not the question still remain who or what made this 
feat possible? One dare affirm that man cannot cre- 
ate life de novo any more than he can create matter. 
He may yet evoke life as he evokes the spark from 
the flint and the flame from the match or as he 
evokes force from the food he eats. In this latter case 
he does not create the force; he liberates it through 
the vital forces of his body. The spark from the flint 
and the flame from the match were called forth by a 
mechanical process, but the process was set going 
by the will which waits upon the vital process. The 
body with all its many functions is a complicated 
system of mechanical devices and chemical pro- 
cesses, but that which is back of all and governs all 
is not mechanical; the body is a machine plus some- 
thing else. 

The chemist or biologist who shall produce a 
209 



TIME AND CHANGE 

speck of protoplasm to-day will have the credit of 
unlocking a power in inorganic nature; he will prove 
by a short cut how immanent the creative energy 
or the vital force of the universe is in matter. He 
will not have eliminated the creative energy; he will 
only have disclosed it and availed himself of it. 

We behold spontaneous combustion, a fire self- 
kindled, but we do not see the activity of the par- 
ticles of matter that preceded it or penetrate the 
secret of their mysterious affinities. The fire was 
potential there in the very constitution of the ele- 
ments. We flout at miracles, and then we disclose 
an unending miracle in the life about us. 

All the life upon the globe, including man with all 
his marvelous powers, surely originated upon the 
globe, surely arose out of the non-living and the non- 
thinking, not by the fiat of some power external to 
nature, but through the creative energy inherent 
in nature and ever active there. The great physical 
instrumentality was heat — without heat the reac- 
tion called life could never have taken place. This 
fact has led a French biologist to say that life is only 
a surface accident in the history of the thermic 
evolution of the globe. Without the disintegration 
of the rocks and the formation of the soil and the 
precipitation of watery vapor, which was indirectly 
the work of heat, the vegetable and the animal could 
not have developed. If we succeed in proving that 
all these things are of chemico-mechanical origin, 

210 



THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 

we still want to know who or what instituted these 
chemical and mechanical powers and the laws that 
govern them. Creation by chemistry and mechanics 
is as mysterious as creation by miracle. We must 
still have a creator, while we can do nothing with 
him nor find any place for him in an endless, begin- 
ningless, infinite series of events. So there we are. 
We go out of the same door by which we came in. 

When all life vanishes from the earth, as it will 
when the condition of heat and moisture has radi- 
cally changed, and eternal refrigeration sets in — 
what then? The potencies of matter will not have 
changed and life will reappear and go through its 
cycle again on some other sphere. 

Life began upon this earth not by miracle in the 
old sense, but by miracle in the new scientific sense 
— by the immanence and ceaseless activity of the 
creative energy in the physical world about us — 
in the sunbeam, in the rains, in the snows, in the air 
currents, and in the soil underfoot; in oxygen, hy- 
drogen, carbon, nitrogen, in lime, iron, silex, phos- 
phorus, and in all the rest of them. Each has its 
laws, its ways, its fixed mode of procedure, its 
affinities, its likes and dislikes, and life is bound up 
with all of them. Jf we hypothesize the ether to 
explain certain phenomena, why should we not 
hypothesize a vital force to account for other mys- 
teries? 

The inorganic passes into the organic as night 
211 



TIME AND CHANGE 

passes into day. Where does one end and the other 
begin? No man can tell. There is no beginning and 
no ending of either, and yet night comes and goes 
and day comes and goes — a constant becoming and 
a constant ending. We are probably in the midday 
of the life of the globe — life huge and rank and 
riotous — the youth of life has passed, life more se- 
date and aspiring and spiritual has come. The gi- 
gantic has gone or is going, the huge monsters of the 
sea and of the land have had their day, man appears 
at the end of the series of lesser but more complete 
forms. 

in 

Many intelligent persons who have been rocked 
in the cradle of the old creeds still look upon evolu- 
tion as a godless doctrine and accuse it of vulgariz- 
ing high and sacred things. This state of mind can 
only be slowly outgrown by familiarizing ourselves 
with the processes of nature or of the creative en- 
ergy in the world of life and matter about us; with 
our own origin in the low fishlike or apelike creature 
in the maternal womb; with the development of 
every plant, tree, and animal from a microscopic 
germ; with the unbroken sequence of natural law; 
with the waste, the delays, the pains, the failures 
on every hand; with the impersonal and the impar- 
tial character of all the physical forces; with the 
transformations and metamorphoses that marked 
the course of animal life; and, above all, with the 

212 



THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 

thought that evolution is not self -caused or in any 
true sense a cause in itself, but the instrument or 
plan of the power that works in and through all 
things. The ways of God in all these details are 
past finding out, but science watches the unfolding 
of a bud, the development of a grain of wheat, the 
growth of the human embryo, the succession of life- 
forms upon the globe as revealed in the records of 
the stratified rocks, or observes in the heavens the 
condensation of nebulous matter into suns and 
systems, and it says this is one of his ways. Evo- 
lution — an endless unfolding and transformation. 
"Urge and urge and urge," says Whitman (I love 
to repeat this saying; it is so significant), "always 
the procreant urge of the world." Always the labor 
and travail pains of the universe to bring forth 
higher forms; always struggle and pain and failure 
and death, but always a new birth and an upward 
reach. 

\ Strike out the element of time and we see evolu- 
tion as the great prestidigitator of the biologic ages. 
The creative energy manipulates a fish and it turns 
into a reptile; it covers a mollusk as with a vapor 
and behold, a backboned creature instead! Now 
we see a little creature no larger than a fox and 
when we look again, behold the horse; a wolf or 
some kindred animal is plunged into the water, and 
behold, the seal ! Some small creature of the lemur 
kind is covered with a capacious hand, and we look 

213 



TIME AND CHANGE 

again, and behold man! We have only to minimize 
time and minimize space to see the impossible hap- 
pening all about us or to see the Mosaic account of 
creation repeated; we have only the clay and water 
to begin with, when, presto! behold what we have 
now! We see the rocks covered with verdure, the 
mountains vanishing into plains, the valleys chang- 
ing into hills or the plains changing into moun- 
tains, tropic lands covered with ice and snow. 

Lord Salisbury thought he had discredited natu- 
ral selection, which is one of the feet upon which 
evolution goes, when he charged that no one had 
ever seen it at work. We have not seen it at work 
because our little span of life is too short. Only the 
palaeontologist traces in the records of the rocks the 
footsteps of this god of change. And rarely if ever 
does he find a continuous and complete record — 
only a footprint here and there, but he sees the 
direction in which they are going and many of the 
places where the traveler tarried. The palaeontolo- 
gist, that detective of the rocks, works up his case 
with the same thoroughness and caution and the 
same power of observation as does the detective in 
human affairs and with a greater sweep of scientific 
imagination. 

An agent of evolution is the influence of the en- 
vironment, but who sees the environment set its 
stamp upon animal life? After many generations we 
may see the accumulated results. In a few in- 

214 



THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 

stances the results are rapid. Thus sheep lose their 
wool in tropical climates and a northern fur-bear- 
ing animal its fur. The well-being of the animal de- 
mands this change, and demands it quickly. Fish 
lose their sense of sight in underground streams; 
this loss is not so vital and it comes about much 
more slowly. A tropical climate sets its stamp upon 
the complexion and character of man, but this 
again is a slow process, as the same stress of neces- 
sity does not exist. 

In the tendency to variation — in form, size, dis- 
position, power, fertility — man differs from all 
other animals. In the same race, in the same fam- 
ily, we find infinitely varied types. Among the wild 
creatures all the individuals of a species are prac- 
tically alike. We can hardly tell one fox, or one 
marmot, or one chipmunk, or one crow, or one 
hawk, or one black duck from another of the same 
species. Of course there are slight individual differ- 
ences, but they are hardly distinguishable. Among 
the insects, one bee, one beetle, one ant, one butter- 
fly seems the exact copy of every other individual 
of its kind. The law of variation seems practically 
annulled in the insect world. 

It is the wide and free range of this law in the 
human species that has undoubtedly led to the 
great progress of the race. There has been no dead 
level — no democracy of talent — no equality of 
gifts, but only equality of opportunity. Men differ 

215 



TIME AND CHANGE 

from one another in their mental endowments, capa- 
cities, and dispositions vastly more than do any 
other creatures upon the earth. This difference 
makes man's chances of progress so much the 
greater; he has so many more stakes in the game. 
If one type of talent fails, another type may win; 
if the lymphatic temperament is not a success, try 
the sanguine or the bilious; blue eyes and black eyes 
and brown eyes will win more triumphs than blue 
or black or brown alone. Arms or legs extra long, 
sight or hearing extra sharp, wit extra keen, judg- 
ment extra sure — all these things open doors to 
more progress. Variation gives natural selection a 
chance to take hold, and where the struggle for life 
is the most severe the changes will be the most rapid 
and the most radical. Without the pressure of the 
environment natural selection would not select. 
The tendency to physical variation in man is prob- 
ably no greater than in other creatures, but his 
tendency to mental variation is enormous. He 
varies daily from mediocrity to genius, hence the 
enormous range of his chances of progress. From 
the first variation that started him on his way in 
his line of descent, variation must have been more 
and more active till he varied in the direction of 
reason, long before the dawn of history, since which 
time his progress has been by rapid strides — and 
more and more rapid till we see his leaps forward in 
recent times. The race owes its rapid progress to 

216 



THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 

its exceptional men, its men of genius and power, 
and these have often been like sports or the sudden 
result of mutations — a man like Lincoln springing 
from the humblest parentage. No such extreme 
variations are seen in any of the lower orders. In- 
deed, in one's lifetime one sees but very slight varia- 
tion in any of the wild or domestic creatures, less 
in the wild than in the domestic because they are 
less under the influence of that most variable of ani- 
mals, man. And man's variations are mainly men- 
tal and not physical. The higher we go in the scale 
of powers, the greater the variation and hence the 
more rapid the evolution. Probably man's body has 
not changed radically in vast cycles of time, but 
his mind has developed enormously since the dawn 
of history. 

IV 

Biologists are coming more and more to recognize 
some unknown factor in evolution, probably some 
unknowable factor. The four factors of Osborn — 
heredity, ontogeny, environment, selection — play 
upon and modify endlessly the new form when it is 
started, but what about the original start? Whence 
comes this inborn momentum, this evolutionary 
send-off? What or who set the whole grand process 
going? 

Bergson sees an internal psychological principle 
of development, hence the name of his book, "Crea- 
tive Evolution." Osborn uses the word "directed." 

217 



TIME AND CHANGE 

Certain characters, he says, are adaptive or suited 
to their purpose from the start; they do not have 
to be fitted to their place by natural selection. 
Huxley uses the word "predestined" — all the life 
of the globe and all the starry hosts of heaven are 
working out in boundless space and in endless time 
"their predestined course of evolution." Darwin 
must have had in mind the same mysterious some- 
thing when he said that man had risen to the very 
summit of the animal scale, but not through his own 
exertions. Not by his own will or exertion, surely, 
any more than the embryo in its mother's womb 
develops into the full-grown child by its own exer- 
tion or than our temperaments and complexions 
and statures are matters of our own wills and choice. 
Something greater than man and before him, to 
which he sustains the relation that the unborn child 
sustains to its mother, must enter into our thought 
of his origin and development. 

The great evolutionists have been very cautious 
about seeking to go behind evolution and name the 
Primal Cause. In such an attempt science would at 
once be beyond soundings. Darwin and Huxley 
were reverent, truth-loving men, but they hesitated 
as men of science to put themselves in a position 
where no step could be taken. 

Slowly man emerges out of the abyss of geologic 
time into the dawn of history, and science gropes 
about like a man feeling his way in the dark or, at 

218 



THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 

most, by the aid now and then of a dim flash of 
• light, to trace the path he has come. He has surely- 
arrived, and we are, I believe, safe in saying he has 
come by the way of the lower orders; but the precise 
forms through which he has come, the houses in 
which he has tarried by the way, and all the adven- 
tures and vicissitudes that befell him on the journey 
— can we ever hope to know these things? In any 
case, man has his antecedents; life has its anteced- 
ents; every beat of one's heart has its antecedent 
cause, which again has its antecedent. We can thus 
traverse the chain of causation only to find it is an 
endless chain; the separate links we can examine, 
but the first link or the last we see, by the very na- 
ture of things, and the laws of our own minds, must 
forever elude us. Science cannot admit of a break 
in the chain of causation, cannot admit that miracles 
or the supernatural in the old sense, as external and 
arbitrary interference with the natural order, can 
play or ever have played any part in this universe. 
Yet science has to postulate a First Cause when it 
knows, or metaphysics knows for it, that with the 
Infinite there can be no first and no last, no begin- 
ning and no ending, only endless succession. 

To science man is not a fallen creature, but a 
many times risen creature and all the good of the 
universe centres in him. The mind that pervades 
all nature and is active in plant and animal alike 
first comes to know itself and regard itself and 

219 



TIME AND CHANGE 

achieve intellectual appreciation in man. While 
all nature below man is wise only to its own ends 
and goes its appointed way as void of self -conscious- 
ness as the stone that falls or the wind that blows, 
the mind of man attains to disinterested wisdom 
and turns upon itself and upon the universe the 
power of objective thought; it alone achieves un- 
derstanding. 

In our studies of life and of the universe as soon 
as we begin to bridge chasms by an appeal to the 
miraculous, or to the extra-natural powers, we are 
traitors to the scientific spirit which we seek to serve. 
There are many things that science cannot explain. 
Perhaps I may say that it cannot give the ultimate 
explanation of anything. It can do little more than 
tell us of the action, the interaction, and the reac- 
tion of things, but of the things themselves, their 
origin and ultimate nature, or the source of the laws 
that govern them, what does it or what can it know? 

Man is the heir of all the geologic ages; he inherits 
the earth after countless generations of animals and 
plants, and the beneficent forces of wind and rain, 
air and sky, have in the course of millions of years 
prepared it for him. His body has been built for 
him through the lives and struggles of the countless 
beings who are in the line of his long descent; his 
mind is equally an accumulated inheritance of the 
mental growth of the myriads of thinking men and 
unthinking animals that went before him. In the 

220 



THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 

forms of his humbler forebears he has himself lived 
and died myriads of times to make ready the soil 
that nurses and sustains him to-day. He is a debtor 
to Cambrian and Silurian times, to the dragons and 
saurians and mastodons that have roamed over the 
earth. Indeed, what is there or has there been in 
the universe that he is not indebted to? The remot- 
est star that shines has sent a ray that has entered 
into his life. All things are under his feet, and the 
keys of the heavens are in his hands. 



One would fain arrive at some concrete belief or 
image of his line of descent in geologic time as he 
does in the historic period. But how hard it is to do 
so! Can we form any mental picture of the actual 
animal forms that the manward impulse has trav- 
eled through? With all the light that palaeontology 
throws upon the animal life of the past, can we see 
where amid the revel of these bizarre forms our an- 
cestor hid himself? Can we see him as a reptile 
in the slime of the jungle or in the waters of the 
Mesozoic world? What was he like or what akin 
to? What mark or sign was there upon him at that 
time of the future that was before him? Can we see 
him as a fish in the old Devonian seas or lakes? Was 
he a big fish or a little fish? The primitive fishes 
were mostly of the shark kind. Is there any con- 
nection between that fact and the human sharks of 

221 



TIME AND CHANGE 

to-day? Much less can one picture to one's self 
what his ancestor was like in the age of the inverte- 
brates, amid the trilobites, etc., of the earlier Palaeo- 
zoic seas. But we must go back even earlier than 
that, back to unicellular life and to original proto- 
plasm, and finally back to fiery nebulous matter. 
What can we make of it all by way of concrete 
conception of what actually took place — of the 
visible, eating, warring, breeding animal forms in 
whose safekeeping our heritage lay? Nothing. We 
are not merely at sea, we are in abysmal depths, 
and the darkness is so thick we can cut it. 

We meet the same difficulty when we try to figure 
to ourselves the line of descent of any of the animal 
forms of to-day. How did they escape the world- 
wild catastrophe of earlier geologic times? Or did 
the creative impulse bank upon life as a whole and 
never become bankrupt, no matter what special 
lines or forms failed? 

The first appearance of the primates is in Eocene 
times and the anthropoid apes in the Miocene, 
probably five millions of years ago. The form which 
may have been in our line of descent, the Dryopithe- 
cus y later appears to have become extinct. Did our 
fate hang upon the success of any of these forms? 
The monkeys and anthropoid apes appeared at the 
same time in different countries. Nature seems to 
have been making preliminary studies of man in 
these various forms, but when and where she hit 

222 



THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 

upon the form that she perfected in man, who 
knows ? 

The horse appears to have been evolved in North 
America, true cattle in Asia, elephants in Africa. 
Can we narrow their line of descent down to a single 
pair for each? Many forms allied to the horse ap- 
peared in Europe and Asia in Miocene times. We 
find monkeys in different parts of the world in the 
same geologic horizons; did they all have a com- 
mon origin? 

Life's apprenticeship has been a long one. The 
earlier forms of vertebrate life were very large; later 
they became very small. Nature seems to have ex- 
perimented with bulk, as if she thought size would 
win in the race. Hence those huge uncouth forms 
among the reptiles and early mammals. The scheme 
did not work well; bulk was not the thing, after all. 
Most of the gigantic forms became extinct. Then 
she tried smaller and more agile forms with larger 
brains — less flesh and more wit. On this line Na- 
ture continued to work till she produced her mas- 
terpiece in man — a rather feeble and nearly wea- 
ponless animal, but with an intangible armory of 
weapons and tools in his brain that enables him 
to put all creatures under his feet. 



XII 
THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST 



BERGSON, the new French philosopher, thinks 
we all had a narrow escape, back in geologic 
time, of having our eggs spoiled before they were 
hatched, or, rather, rendered incapable of hatching 
by too thick a shell. This was owing to the voracity 
of the early organisms. As they became more and 
more mobile, they began to take on thick armors 
and breastplates and shells and calcareous skins to 
protect themselves from one another. This tend- 
ency resulted, he thinks, in the arrest of the en- 
tire animal world in its evolution toward higher 
and higher forms. These shells and armors begat 
a kind of torpor and immobility which has con- 
tinued down to our day with the echinoderms 
and mollusks, but the arthropods and vertebrates 
escaped it by some lucky stroke. Now you and 
I are here without imprisoning shells on our 
backs; but how or why did we escape? Bergson does 
not say. Was it a matter of luck or chance? Was 
there ever a time when the stream of life tended to 
harden and become fixed in its own forms like a 
stream of cooling lava, or has the innate plasticity 

225 



TIME AND CHANGE 

of life been easily equal to its own ends? True, the 
clam remains a clam, and the starfish remains a 
starfish; some other forms have carried the evo- 
lutionary impulse forward till it flowered in man. 
Was this impulse ever really checked or endan- 
gered? Was the golden secret ever intrusted to 
the keeping of any single form? and, had that form 
been cut off, would the earth have been still with- 
out its man? These are puzzling questions. 

Thus, when we have come to look upon life and 
nature in the light of evolution, what vistas are 
opened to us where before were only blank walls! 
The geologic ages take on a new interest to us. We 
know that in some form we were even there. The 
systems of sedimentary rocks which the geologist 
portrays, piled one upon the other to a depth of 
fifty miles or more, seem like the stairway by which 
we have ascended, taking on some new and more 
developed form at each rise. What we were at the 
first step in Cambrian times only the Lord knows, 
but whatever we were, we crept up or floated up 
to the next rise. In the Silurian seas we may have 
been a trilobite for aught we know; at any rate, we 
were the outcome of the life impulse that begat the 
trilobites, but our fate was not bound up with theirs, 
as their race came to an end in those early geologic 
ages, and our stem form did not. Whether or not 
we were a fish in the Devonian seas, there is little 
doubt that we had gills, because we h^ve the gilk 

226 



THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST 

slits yet in our early foetal life, and it is quite certain 
that in some way weowe our backbones to the fishes. 

When the rocks that form my native Catskills 
were being laid down in the Devonian waters, I 
fancy that my aquatic embryo was swimming about 
somewhere and slowly waxing strong. Up and up I 
climbed across the sandstone steps, across the lime- 
stone, the conglomerate, the slate, up into Carbon- 
iferous times. The upper and nether millstones of the 
" millstone grit" did not crush me, neither did the 
floods and the convulsions of Carboniferous times 
that buried the vast vegetable growths that re- 
sulted in our coal measures engulf or destroy me. 
About that time probably, I emerged from the water 
and became an amphibian, and maybe got my five 
fingers and five toes on each side. 

Nor did the wholesale destruction of animal life 
at the end of Palaeozoic time cut off my line of de- 
scent. The monstrous reptiles of the succeeding or 
Mesozoic age, the petrified remains of one of which 
was recently found in the sandstone rocks near the 
river's edge under the Palisades of the Hudson, do 
not seem to have endangered the golden thread by 
which our fate hung. Still "I mount and mount. " 
The stairs by which I climb were rent by earth- 
quakes and volcanoes, the strata were squeezed up 
and overturned and folded in the great mountain- 
chains; the Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, the 
Coast Range were born; the earth-throes must have 

227 



TIME AND CHANGE 

been tremendous at times; yet I escaped it all. 
The huge and fearful mammals of the third or Ter- 
tiary period passed me by unharmed. Eruptions 
and cataclysms, the sinking of the land, the inun- 
dations of the sea, world-wide deformations of the 
earth's crust, fire and ice and floods, monsters of the 
deep and dragons of the land and the air have beset 
my course from the first, and yet here I am, here we 
all are, and apparently none the worse for the ap- 
palling dangers we have passed through. 

Evolution thus makes the world over for us. It 
shows us in what a complex web of vital and far- 
reaching relations we stand. It gives us an outlook 
upon the past that is startling, and in some ways 
forbidding, yet one that ought to be stimulating and 
inspiring. If we look back with a shudder we should 
look forward with a thrill. If the past is terrible, 
the future is in the same degree cheering and invit- 
ing. If we came out of those lowly and groveling 
forms, to what heights of being may we not be carried 
by the impetus that brought us thus far? In fact, to 
what heights has it already carried us! 

ii 

That the hazards of the past, to many forms of 
life, at least, have been real and no myth, is evident 
from the vast number of forms that have been cut 
off and become extinct; various causes, now hard 
to decipher, have worked together to the end, such 

228 



THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST 

as changed geographical conditions, changes of cli- 
mate, affecting the food- supply, extreme specializ- 
ation, like that of the sabre-toothed tiger whose 
petrified remains have been found in various parts 
of this continent, and who apparently was finally 
handicapped by his huge dental sabre. Probably 
many more species of animals have become extinct 
than have survived, but none of these could have 
been in the line of man's descent, else the human 
race would not have been here. If the Eocene pro- 
genitor of the horse, the little four-toed eohippus, 
had been cut off, would not the world have been 
horseless to-day? The horse in America became ex- 
tinct, from some cause only conjectural, many tens 
of thousands of years ago. Had the same fate be- 
fallen the horse in Europe and Asia, it seems prob- 
able that our civilization would have been far less 
advanced to-day than it is. 

The fate of every species of mammal in our time 
seems to have been in the keeping of a single form 
in early Tertiary times. The end of the Cretaceous 
or chalk period saw the extinction of the giant rep- 
tiles both of sea and of land, at the same time that 
it saw the appearance of a great many species of 
small and inconspicuous mammals, among which 
doubtless were our own humble forebears. Extreme 
specialization in any direction may narrow an an- 
imal's chances of survival; they have but one chance 
in the game of life, whereas an animal with a more 



TIME AND CHANGE 

generalized organization has many chances. Man 
is one of the most generalized of animals; no special 
tools, no special weapons — his hand many tools and 
weapons in one. Hence he is the most adaptable 
of animals; all climes, all foods, all places are his; he 
is master of the land, of the sea, of the air. 

Animal life is often curiously interdependent. I 
asked our guide in the Adirondack^ if there were 
any ravens there. "Not nearly as many as there 
used to be," he said, and his explanation of their 
disappearance seems thoroughly scientific; it was 
that the wolves and the panthers kept them in meat, 
and now that these animals had disappeared, the 
ravens had little to feed upon. If the moose were 
compelled to graze from off the ground, like a sheep 
or a cow, the species would probably soon become 
extinct. Osborn thinks it probable that the huge 
beast called titanothere finally became extinct early 
in Tertiary times owing to the form of its teeth, 
which were of such a type that they could not 
change to meet a change in the flora upon which the 
creature fed. Of course we shall never know what 
narrow escapes our race had from extinction in the 
remote past; some forms have ended in a blind alley, 
like the sea-urchin and the oyster. Arthropoda have 
continued to evolve and have reached their high- 
water mark of intelligence in bees and ants. The 
vertebrates went forward and have culminated in 
man. Bergson thinks that in the vertebrates intel- 

230 



THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST 

Hgence has been developed at the expense of in- 
stinct, and that in the invertebrates instinct has 
been perfected at the expense of intelligence. 

Are we not compelled to adopt what is called the 
monophyletic hypothesis, that is, that our line of 
descent started from one pair, male and female, 
somewhere in the vast stretch of geologic or biologic 
time, and to reason that, had that pair been out of 
the race, we should not have appeared? 

Can we narrow life to a single point, a single cell, 
in the past? Was there one and only one first bit of 
protoplasm? If we were to say that life first ap- 
peared on the globe in Cambrian times, just what 
should we mean? That it began as a single point, 
or as many points? When we say that the primates 
first appeared in Eocene times, do we mean that 
one single primate appeared then? If so, what form 
went immediately before him? This is all a vain 
speculation. 

Does man presuppose all the vertebrate sub-king- 
dom? Was he safe as long as one vertebrate form 
remained? Are his forebears many, and not one 
pair? Can we think of his ancestry under the image 
of a tree, and of him as one of the many branches? If 
so, nothing but the destruction of the tree would have 
imperiled his appearance, or the lopping off of his 
particular branch. Probably all such images are 
misleading. We simply cannot figure to ourselves 
the tangled course of our biological descent. If 

231 



TIME AND CHANGE 

thwartings and accidents and delays could have cut 
man off, how could he have escaped? We cannot 
think of man as one; we are compelled to think of 
him as many; and yet in all our experience the many 
come from the one, or the one pair. 

How thick the field of animal life in the past is 
strewn with extinct forms ! — as thick as the sidereal 
spaces are strewn with the fragments of wrecked 
worlds ! But other worlds and suns are spun out of 
the wrecked worlds and suns through the process of 
cosmic evolution. The world-stuff is worked over 
and over. Extinct animal forms must have given 
rise to other, allied forms before they perished, and 
these to still others, and so on down to our time. 

The image of a tree is misleading from the fact 
that all the different branches of the animal king- 
dom, from the protozoa up to man, have come along 
with what we call the higher branches, the mam- 
mals ; the suckers have kept pace with the main stalk, 
so that we have the image of a sheaf of branches 
starting from a common origin and all of equal 
length. Man has brought on his relations along with 
him. 

There is no glamour of romance over that past. 
It was all hard, prosy, terrible fact. The earth's 
crust was less stable than now, the upheavals and 
subsidences and earthquakes more frequent, the 
warring of the elements more fierce and incessant, 
deluge and inundation in more rapid succession, and 

232 



THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST 

the riot and excesses of animal life far beyond any- 
thing we know of. And our line of descent was tak- 
ing its chances amid it all. The widespread blotting 
out of life at the end of Palaeozoic time, and again at 
the end of Mesozoic times, when myriads of forms 
were cut off, probably from some convulsion of na- 
ture or some cosmic catastrophe; and again during 
the ice age, when the camel, the llama, the horse, 
the tapir, the mastodon, the elephant, the giant 
sloth, became extinct in North America — how 
fared it with our ancestor during these terrible ages? 
There is no sure trace of him till late Tertiary times, 
and it is probably not more than two hundred thou- 
sand years ago that he assumed the upright attitude 
and began to use tools. Probably in Europe fifty 
thousand years ago he was living in caves, clothed 
in skins, contending with the cave bear and cave 
lion, using rude stone implements, and hunting the 
hairy mastodon, etc. In Asia the probabilities are 
that he was farther on the road toward the dawn of 
history. 

We may think of our descent in the historic period 
under the image of the stream, though of a stream 
many times delayed and diverted, even many times 
diminished by wars and plagues and famine, but a 
stream with some sort of unity and continuity, since 
man became man. The stream of life is like any 
other stream in this respect. Divert or use up part 

233 



TIME AND CHANGE 

of the water of a stream, yet what is left flows on 
and keeps up the continuity and identity of the 
stream; dip your cup into it here, and you will not 
get precisely the same water you would have got 
had none of it been diverted or used far back in its 
course — you get the water that was allowed to 
flow by. 

Had there been no loss of life by war and pesti- 
lence and accidents of various kinds, the different 
countries would have been occupied by quite other 
men and women than those that fill them to-day. 
The course of life in every neighborhood is changed 
by what seem like accidental causes, as when a fam- 
ily is practically wiped out by some accident or dread 
disease. This brings new people on the scene. The 
farm or the business falls into other hands, and new 
social relations spring up, new men and women are 
brought together or the old ones driven apart, mar- 
riage is hastened or retarded, opportunities for fam- 
ily life are made or unmade, and fewer children, or 
more children, as the case may be, are the result. 
The issue of some battle hundreds or thousands of 
years ago may have played a part in your life and 
mine to-day — other races, other individuals of the 
race, would have been thrown together had the issue 
been different, and other families started, so that 
some one else would have been here in our stead. 

But the question of hazard to the race of man in 
geologic time is quite a different one. Here our fate 

234 



THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST 

seems to hang by a single thread — a golden thread, 
we may call it, but, in that terrible maze of clashing 
forces and devouring forms of the vast geologic peri- 
ods, how liable to be broken! It is not now a ques- 
tion of the continuity of a stream, but of the contin- 
uity of a single evolutionary process, or, as Haeckel 
says, the continuity of the morphological chain 
which stretches from the lemurs up through tailed 
and tailless anthropoid apes to man. If the evolu- 
tionary impulse had been checked or extinguished in 
the lemur — that small apelike animal that went 
before the true ape, the fossil remains of which have 
been found on this continent and the survivals of 
which are now found in Madagascar — would man 
have appeared? Again, if the race of lemurs devel- 
oped from a single pair, how precarious seems our 
fate! In fact, if any of the transitional forms be- 
tween species can be reduced to a single pair — as 
the forms that connect the reptiles with the mam- 
mals — our fate would seem to be in the keeping 
of these forms. Over this single frail bridge which 
escaped the floods and the tornadoes and the earth- 
quakes of those terrible ages we must have passed. 
What risky business it all seems ! Was it luck or law 
that favored us? Doubtless, if we could penetrate 
the mystery, we should see that there was no chance 
or risk in the matter. We cannot go very far in 
solving these great fundamental questions by ap- 
plying to them the tests of our own experience. 

235 



TIME AND CHANGE 

Numberless specific forms become extinct, but the 
impulse that begat the form does not die out. Thus, 
all the giant reptiles died out — the dinosaurs, the 
mesosaurs — but the reptilian impulse still sur- 
vives. How many types of invertebrates have per- 
ished! but the invertebrate impulse still goes on. 
How many species of mammals have been cut off! 
yet the mammal impulse has steadily gone forward. 
These things suggest the wave that moves on but 
leaves the water behind. The vertebrate impulse 
began in wormlike forms, in the old Palseozoic seas, 
and stopped not till it culminated in man. This im- 
pulse has left many forms behind it; but has this 
impulse itself ever been endangered? If one looks at 
the matter thus in an abstract instead of a concrete 
way, the problem of our descent becomes easier. 

When we look at the evolution of life on a grand 
scale, nature seems to feel her way, like a blind man, 
groping, hesitating, trying this road and then that. 
In some cases the line of evolution seems to end in a 
cut de sac beyond which no progress is possible. The 
forms thus cornered soon become extinct. The 
mystery, the unaccountable thing, is the appearance 
of new characters. The slow modification or trans- 
formation of an existing character may often be 
traced; natural selection, or the struggle for exist- 
ence, takes it in hand and adapts and perpetuates it, 
or else eliminates it. But the origin of certain new 
parts or characters — that is the secret of the evolu- 

236 



THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST 

tionary process. Thus there was a time when no 
animal had horns; then horns appeared. "In the 
great quadruped known as titano there," says Os- 
born, "rudiments of horns first arise independently 
at certain definite parts of the skull; they arise at 
first alike in both sexes, or asexually; then they be- 
come sexual, or chiefly characteristic of males; then 
they rapidly evolve in the males while being arrested 
in development in the females; finally, they become 
in some of the animals dominant characteristics to 
which all others bend." Nature seems to throw out 
these new characters and then lets them take their 
chances in the clash of forces and tendencies that 
go on in the arena of life. If they serve a purpose or 
are an advantage, they remain; if not, they drop 
out. Nature feels her way. The horns proved of less 
advantage to the females than to the males; they 
seem a part of the plus or overflow of the male prin- 
ciple, like the beard in man — the badge of mas- 
culinity. The titanothere is traceable back to a 
hornless animal the size of a sheep, and it ended in 
a horned quadruped nearly as large as an elephant. 
It flourished in Wyoming in early Tertiary times. 
Nature did not seem to know what to do with horns 
when she first got them. She played with them like 
a child with a new toy. Thus she gave two pairs to 
several species of mammals, one pair on the nose and 
one pair on the top of the skull — certainly an em- 
barrassment of weapons. 

237 



TIME AND CHANGE 

The first horns appear to have been crude, 
heavy, uncouth, but long before we reach our own 
geologic era they appear in various species of quad- 
rupeds, and become graceful and ornamental. How 
beautiful they are in many of the African antelope 
tribe! Nature's workmanship nearly always im- 
proves with time, like that of man's, and sooner 
or later takes on an ornamental phase. 

The early uncouth, bizarre forms seem to be the 
result of the excess or surplus of life. Life in remote 
biologic times was rank and riotous, as it is now, 
in a measure, in tropical lands. One reason may be 
that the climate of the globe during the middle 
period, and well into the third period, appears to 
have been of a tropical character. The climatic and 
seasonal divisions were not at all pronounced, and 
both animal and vegetable life took on gigantic 
and grotesque forms. In the ugliness of alligator 
and rhinoceros and hippopotamus of our day we get 
some hint of what early reptilian and mammalian 
life was like. 

That Nature should have turned out better and 
better handiwork as the ages passed; that she either 
should have improved upon every model or else dis- 
carded it; that she should have progressed from the 
bird, half -dragon, to the sweet songsters of our day 
and to the superb forms of the air that we know; 
that evolution should have entered upon a refining 
and spiritualizing phase, developing larger brains 

238 



THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST 

and smaller bodies, is a very significant fact, and 
one quite beyond the range of the mechanistic con- 
ception of life. 

Our own immediate line of descent leads down 
through the minor forms of Tertiary and Mesozoic 
times — forms that probably skulked and dodged 
about amid the terrible and gigantic creatures of 
those ages as the small game of to-day hide and flee 
from the presence of their arch-enemy, man; and 
that the frail line upon which the fate of the human 
race hung should not have been severed during the 
wild turmoil of those ages is, to me, a source of per- 
petual wonder. 

in 

The hazards of the future of the race must be 
quite different from those I have been considering. 
They are the hazards incident to an exceptional 
being upon this earth — a being that takes his fate 
in his own hands in a sense that no other creature 
does. 

Man has partaken of the fruit of the Tree of 
Good and Evil, which all the lower orders have es- 
caped. He knows, and knows that he knows. Will 
this knowledge, through the opposition in which it 
places him to elemental nature and the vast system 
of artificial things with which it has enabled him to 
surround himself, cut short his history upon this 
planet? Will Nature in the end be avenged for the 
secrets he has forced from her? His civilization has 

239 



TIME AND CHANGE 

doubtless made him the victim of diseases to which 
the lower orders, and even savage man, are strang- 
ers. Will not these diseases increase as his life be- 
comes more and more complex and artificial? Will 
he go on extending his mastery over Nature and re- 
fining or suppressing his natural appetites till his 
original hold upon life is fatally enfeebled? 

It seems as though science ought to save man and 
prolong his stay on this planet, — it ought to bring 
him natural salvation, as his religion promises him 
supernatural salvation. But of course, man's fate 
is bound up with the fate of the planet and of the 
biological tree of which he is one of the shoots. 
Biology is rooted in geology. The higher forms of 
life did not arbitrarily appear, they flowed out of 
conditions that were long in maturing; they flow- 
ered in season, and the flower will fall in season. 
Man could not have appeared earlier than he did, 
nor later than he did; he came out of what went be- 
fore, and he will go out with what comes after. His 
coming was natural, and his going will be natural. 
His period had a beginning, and it will have an end. 
Natural philosophy leads one to affirm this; but of 
time measured by human history he may yet have a 
lease of tens of thousands of years. 

The hazard of the future is a question of both 
astronomy and geology. That there are cosmic 
dangers, though infinitely remote, every astronomer 
knows. That there are collisions between heavenly 

240 



THE HAZARDS OF THE PAST 

bodies is an indubitable fact, and if collisions do 
happen to any, allow time enough and they must 
happen to all. That there are geologic dangers 
through the shifting and crumpling of the earth's 
crust, every geologist knows, though probably none 
that could wipe out the whole race of man. The 
biologic dangers of the past we have outlived — 
the dangers that must have beset a single line of 
descent amid the carnival of power and the ferocity 
of the monster reptiles of Mesozoic times, and the 
wholesale extinction of species that occurred in 
different geologic periods. 

Nothing but a cosmic catastrophe, involving the 
fate of the whole earth, could now exterminate the 
human race. It is highly improbable that this will 
ever happen. The race of man will go out from a 
slow, insensible failure, through the aging of the 
planet, of the conditions of life that brought man 
here. The evolutionary process upon a cooling 
world must, after the elapse of a vast period of time, 
lose its impetus and cease. 



XIII 
THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 



THE other day a clergyman who described him- 
self as a preacher of the gospel of Christ wrote, 
asking me to come and talk to his people on the gos- 
pel of Nature. The request set me to thinking 
whether or not Nature has any gospel in the sense 
the clergyman had in mind, any message that is 
likely to be specially comforting to the average 
orthodox religious person. I suppose the parson 
wished me to tell his flock what I had found in Na- 
ture that was a strength or a solace to myself. 

What had all my many years of journeyings to 
Nature yielded me that would supplement or rein- 
force the gospel he was preaching? Had the birds 
taught me any valuable lessons? Had the four- 
footed beasts? Had the insects? Had the flowers, 
the trees, the soil, the coming and the going of the 
seasons? Had I really found sermons in stones, 
books in running brooks and good in everything? 
Had the lilies of the field, that neither toil nor spin, 
and yet are more royally clad than Solomon in all 
his glory, helped me in any way to clothe myself 
with humility, with justice, with truthfulness? 

243 



TIME AND CHANGE 

It is not easy for one to say just what he owes to 
all these things. Natural influences work indirectly 
as well as directly; they work upon the subconscious, 
as well as upon the conscious, self. That I am a 
saner, healthier, more contented man, with truer 
standards of life, for all my loiterings in the fields 
and woods, I am fully convinced. 

That I am less social, less interested in my neigh- 
bors and in the body politic, more inclined to shirk 
civic and social responsibilities and to stop my ears 
against the brawling of the reformers, is perhaps 
equally true. 

One thing is certain, in a hygienic way I owe 
much to my excursions to Nature. They have helped 
to clothe me with health, if not with humility; they 
have helped sharpen and attune all my senses; they 
have kept my eyes in such good trim that they have 
not failed me for one moment during all the seventy- 
five years I have had them; they have made my 
sense of smell so keen that I have much pleasure in 
the wild, open-air perfumes, especially in the spring 
— the delicate breath of the blooming elms and 
maples and willows, the breath of the woods, of the 
pastures, of the shore. This keen, healthy sense of 
smell has made me abhor tobacco and flee from close 
rooms, and put the stench of cities behind me. I 
fancy that this whole world of wild, natural per- 
fumes is lost to the tobacco-user and to the city- 
dweller. Senses trained in the open air are in tune 

244 



THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 

with open-air objects; they are quick, delicate, and 
discriminating. When I go to town, my ear suffers 
as well as my nose : the impact of the city upon my 
senses is hard and dissonant; the ear is stunned, the 
nose is outraged, and the eye is confused. When I 
come back, I go to Nature to be soothed and healed, 
and to have my senses put in tune once more. I 
know that, as a rule, country or farming folk are not 
remarkable for the delicacy of their senses, but this 
is owing mainly to the benumbing and brutalizing 
effect of continued hard labor. It is their minds 
more than their bodies that suffer. 

When I have dwelt in cities the country was 
always near by, and I used to get a bite of country 
soil at least once a week to keep my system nor- 
mal. 

Emerson says that "the day does not seem wholly 
profane in which we have given heed to some natural 
object." If Emerson had stopped to qualify his re- 
mark, he would have added, if we give heed to it in 
the right spirit, if we give heed to it as a nature-lover 
and truth-seeker. Nature love as Emerson knew it, 
and as Wordsworth knew it, and as any of the 
choicer spirits of our time have known it, has dis- 
tinctly a religious value. It does not come to a man 
or a woman who is wholly absorbed in selfish or 
worldly or material ends. Except ye become in a 
measure as little children, ye cannot enter the king- 
dom of Nature — as Audubon entered it, as Tho- 

245 



TIME AND CHANGE 

reau entered it, as Bryant and Amiel entered it, and 
as all those enter it who make it a resource in their 
lives and an instrument of their culture. The forms 
and creeds of religion change, but the sentiment of 
religion — the wonder and reverence and love we feel 
in the presence of the inscrutable universe — per- 
sists. Indeed, these seem to be renewing their life 
to-day in this growing love for all natural objects 
and in this increasing tenderness toward all forms 
of life. If we do not go to church so much as did our 
fathers, we go to the woods much more, and are 
much more inclined to make a temple of them than 
they were. 

We now use the word Nature very much as our 
fathers used the word God, and, I suppose, back of 
it all we mean the power that is everywhere present 
and active, and in whose lap the visible universe is 
held and nourished. It is a power that we can see 
and touch and hear, and realize every moment of 
our lives how absolutely we are dependent upon it. 
There are no atheists or skeptics in regard to this 
power. All men see how literally we are its child- 
ren, and all men learn how swift and sure is the 
penalty of disobedience to its commands. 

Our associations with Nature vulgarize it and rob 
it of its divinity. When we come to see that the 
celestial and the terrestrial are one, that time and 
eternity are one, that mind and matter are one, that 
death and life are one, that there is and can be no- 

246 



THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 

thing not inherent in Nature, then we no longer look 
for or expect a far-off, unknown God. 

Nature teaches more than she preaches. There 
are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark 
out of a stone than a moral. Even when it contains 
a fossil, it teaches history rather than morals. It 
comes down from the fore-world an undigested bit 
that has resisted the tooth and maw of time, and 
can tell you many things if you have the eye to read 
them. The soil upon which it lies or in which it is 
imbedded was rock, too, back in geologic time, but 
the mill that ground it up passed the fragment of 
stone through without entirely reducing it. Very 
likely it is made up of the minute remains of innum- 
erable tiny creatures that lived and died in the an- 
cient seas. Very likely it was torn from its parent 
rock and brought to the place where it now lies by 
the great ice-flood that many tens of thousands of 
years ago crept slowly but irresistibly down out of 
the North over the greater part of all the northern 
continents. 

But all this appeals to the intellect, and contains 
no lesson for the moral nature. If we are to find 
sermons in stones, we are to look for them in the re- 
lations of the stones to other things — when they 
are out of place, when they press down the grass or 
the flowers, or impede the plow, or dull the scythe, 
or usurp the soil, or shelter vermin, as do old institu- 
tions and old usages that have had their day. A 

247 



TIME AND CHANGE 

stone that is much knocked about gets its sharp 
angles worn off, as do men. " A rolling stone gathers 
no moss," which is not bad for the stone, as moss 
hastens decay. "Killing two birds with one stone" 
is a bad saying, because it reminds boys to stone the 
birds, which is bad for both boys and birds. But 
"People who live in glass houses should not throw 
stones" is on the right side of the account, as it dis- 
courages stone-throwing and reminds us that we 
are no better than our neighbors. 

The lesson in running brooks is that motion is a 
great purifier and health-producer. When the brook 
ceases to run, it soon stagnates. It keeps in touch 
with the great vital currents when it is in motion, 
and unites with other brooks to help make the river. 
In motion it soon leaves all mud and sediment be- 
hind. Do not proper work and the exercise of will 
power have the same effect upon our lives? 

The other day in my walk I came upon a sap- 
bucket that had been left standing by the maple 
tree all the spring and summer. What a bucketful 
of corruption was that, a mixture of sap and rain- 
water that had rotted, and smelled to heaven. Mice 
and birds and insects had been drowned in it, and 
added to its unsavory character. It was a bit of Na- 
ture cut off from the vitalizing and purifying chem- 
istry of the whole. With what satisfaction I emp- 
tied it upon the ground while I held my nose and 
saw it filter into the turf, where I knew it was dying 

248 



THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 

to go and where I knew every particle of the reeking, 
fetid fluid would soon be made sweet and whole- 
some again by the chemistry of the soil ! 

ii 

I am not always in sympathy with nature-study 
as pursued in the schools, as if this kingdom could 
be carried by assault. Such study is too cold, too 
special, too mechanical; it is likely to rub the bloom 
off Nature. It lacks soul and emotion; it misses the 
accessories of the open air and its exhilarations, the 
sky, the clouds, the landscape, and the currents of 
life that pulse everywhere. 

I myself have never made a dead set at studying 
Nature with note-book and field-glass in hand. I 
have rather visited with her. We have walked to- 
gether or sat down together, and our intimacy grows 
with the seasons. What I have learned about her 
ways I have learned easily, almost unconsciously, 
while fishing or camping or idling about. My desult- 
ory habits have their disadvantages, no doubt, but 
they have their advantages also. A too strenuous 
pursuit defeats itself. In the fields and woods more 
than anywhere else all things come to those who 
wait, because all things are on the move, and are 
sure sooner or later to come your way. 

To absorb a thing is better than to learn it, and 
we absorb what we enjoy. We learn things at 
school, we absorb them in the fields and woods and 

249 



TIME AND CHANGE 

on the farm. When we look upon Nature with fond- 
ness and appreciation she meets us halfway and 
takes a deeper hold upon us than when studiously 
conned. Hence I say the way of knowledge of Na- 
ture is the way of love and enjoyment, and is more 
surely found in the open air than in the school-room 
or the laboratory. The other day I saw a lot of col- 
lege girls dissecting cats and making diagrams of the 
circulation and muscle-attachments, and I thought 
it pretty poor business unless the girls were taking 
a course in comparative anatomy with a view to 
some occupation in life. What is the moral and in- 
tellectual value of this kind of knowledge to those 
girls? Biology is, no doubt, a great science in the 
hands of great men, but it is not for all. I myself 
have got along very well without it. I am sure I 
can learn more of what I want to know from a kit- 
ten on my knee than from the carcass of a cat in 
the laboratory. Darwin spent eight years dissecting 
barnacles; but he was Darwin, and did not stop at 
barnacles, as these college girls are pretty sure to 
stop at cats. He dissected and put together again 
in his mental laboratory the whole system of animal 
life, and the upshot of his work was a tremendous 
gain to our understanding of the universe. 

I would rather see the girls in the fields and woods 
studying and enjoying living nature, training their 
eyes to see correctly and their hearts to respond 
intelligently. What is knowledge without enjoy- 

250 



THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 

ment, without love? It is sympathy, appreciation, 
emotional experience, which refine and elevate and 
breathe into exact knowledge the breath of life. 
My own interest is in living nature as it moves 
and flourishes about me winter and summer. 

I know it is one thing to go forth as a nature-lover, 
and quite another to go forth in a spirit of cold, 
calculating, exact science. I call myself a nature- 
lover and not a scientific naturalist. All that sci- 
ence has to tell me is welcome, is, indeed, eagerly 
sought for. I must know as well as feel. I am not 
merely contented, like Wordsworth's poet, to enjoy 
what others understand. I must understand also; 
but above all things I must enjoy. How much of my 
enjoyment springs from my knowledge I do not 
know. The joy of knowing is very great; the delight 
of picking up the threads of meaning here and there, 
and following them through the maze of confusing 
facts, I know well. When I hear the woodpecker 
drumming on a dry limb in spring or the grouse 
drumming in the woods, and know what it is all for, 
why, that knowledge, I suppose, is part of my enjoy- 
ment. The other part is the associations that those 
sounds call up as voicing the arrival of spring: they 
are the drums that lead the joyous procession. 

To enjoy understandingly, that, I fancy, is the 
great thing to be desired. When I see the large 
ichneumon-fly, Thalessa, making a loop over her 
back with her long ovipositor and drilling a hole in 

251 



TIME AND CHANGE 

the trunk of a tree, I do not fully appreciate the 
spectacle till I know she is feeling for the burrow of 
a tree-borer, Tremex, upon the larvae of which her 
own young feed. She must survey her territory like 
an oil-digger and calculate where she is likely to 
strike oil, which in her case is the burrow of her host 
Tremex. There is a vast series of facts in natural 
history like this that are of little interest until we 
understand them. They are like the outside of a 
book which may attract us, but which can mean 
little to us until we have opened and perused its 
pages. 

The nature-lover is not looking for mere facts, 
but for meanings, for something he can translate 
into the terms of his own life. He wants facts, but 
significant facts — luminous facts that throw light 
upon the ways of animate and inanimate nature. 
A bird picking up crumbs from my window-sill does 
not mean much to me. It is a pleasing sight and 
touches a tender cord, but it does not add much to 
my knowledge of bird-life. But when I see a bird 
pecking and fluttering angrily at my window-pane, 
as I now and then do in spring, apparently under 
violent pressure to get in, I am witnessing a signi- 
ficant comedy in bird-life, one that illustrates the 
limits of animal instinct. The bird takes its own 
reflected image in the glass for a hated rival, and is 
bent on demolishing it. Let the assaulting bird get 
a glimpse of the inside of the empty room through 

252 



THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 

a broken pane, and it is none the wiser; it returns 
to the assault as vigorously as ever. 

The fossils in the rocks did not mean much to the 
earlier geologists. They looked upon them as freaks 
of Nature, whims of the creative energy, or vestiges 
of Noah's flood. You see they were blinded by the 
preconceived notions of the six-day theory of crea- 
tion. 

in 

I do not know that the bird has taught me any 
valuable lesson. Indeed, I do not go to Nature to 
be taught. I go for enjoyment and companionship. 
I go to bathe in her as in a sea; I go to give my eyes 
and ears and all my senses a free, clean field and to 
tone up my spirits by her "primal sanities." If the 
bird has not preached to me, it has added to the re- 
sources of my life, it has widened the field of my 
interests, it has afforded me another beautiful ob- 
ject to love, and has helped make me feel more at 
home in this world. To take the birds out of my life 
would be like lopping off so many branches from the 
tree : there is so much less surface of leafage to absorb 
the sunlight and bring my spirits in contact with the 
vital currents. We cannot pursue any natural study 
with love and enthusiasm without the object of it 
becoming a part of our lives. The birds, the flowers, 
the trees, the rocks, all become linked with our lives 
and hold the key to our thoughts and emotions. 

Not till the bird becomes a part of your life can 
253 



TIME AND CHANGE 

its coming and its going mean much to you. And 
it becomes a part of your life when you have taken 
heed of it with interest and affection, when you have 
established associations with it, when it voices the 
spring or the summer to you, when it calls up the 
spirit of the woods or the fields or the shore. When 
year after year you have heard the veery in the 
beech and birch woods along the trout streams, or 
the wood thrush May after May in the groves where 
you have walked or sat, and the bobolink summer 
after summer in the home meadows, or the vesper 
sparrow in the upland pastures where you have loi- 
tered as a boy or mused as a man, these birds will 
really be woven into the texture of your life. 

What lessons the birds have taught me I cannot 
recall; what a joy they have been to me I know well. 
In a new place, amid strange scenes, theirs are the 
voices and the faces of old friends. In Bermuda the 
bluebirds and the catbirds and the cardinals seemed 
to make American territory of it. Our birds had 
annexed the island despite the Britishers. 

For many years I have in late April seen the red- 
poll warbler, perhaps for only a single day, flitting 
about as I walked or worked. It is usually my first 
warbler, and my associations with it are very pleas- 
ing. But I really did not know how pleasing until, 
one March day, when I was convalescing from a 
serious illness in one of our sea-coast towns, I 
chanced to spy the little traveler in a vacant lot 

254 



THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 

along the street, now upon the ground, now upon a 
bush, nervous and hurried as usual, uttering its 
sharp chip, and showing the white in its tail. The 
sight gave me a real home feeling. It did me more 
good than the medicine I was taking. It instantly- 
made a living link with many past springs. Any- 
thing that calls up a happy past, how it warms the 
present! There, too, that same day I saw my first 
meadowlark of the season in a vacant lot, flashing 
out the white quills in her tail, and walking over the 
turf in the old, erect, alert manner. The sight was 
as good as a letter from home, and better: it had a 
flavor of the wild and of my boyhood days on the 
old farm that no letter could ever have. 

The spring birds always awaken a thrill wherever 
I am. The first bobolink I hear flying over north- 
ward and bursting out in song now and then, full of 
anticipation of those broad meadows where he will 
soon be with his mate; or the first swallow twitter- 
ing joyously overhead, borne on a warm southern 
breeze; or the first high-hole sounding out his long, 
iterated call from the orchard or field — how all 
these things send a wave of emotion over me! 

Pleasures of another kind are to find a new bird, and 
to see an old bird in a new place, as I did recently in 
the old sugar-bush where I used to help gather and boil 
sap as a boy. It was the logcock, or pileated wood- 
pecker, a rare bird anywhere, and one I had never 
seen before on the old farm. I heard his loud cackle 

255 



TIME AND CHANGE 

in a maple tree, saw him flit from branch to branch 
for a few moments, and then launch out and fly 
toward a distant wood. But he left an impression 
with me that I should be sorry to have missed. 

Nature stimulates our aesthetic and our intellect- 
ual life and to a certain extent our religious emo- 
tions, but I fear we cannot find much support for 
our ethical system in the ways of wild Nature. I 
know our artist naturalist, Ernest Thompson Seton, 
claims to find what we may call the biological value 
of the Ten Commandments in the lives of the wild 
animals; but I cannot make his reasoning hold 
water, at least not much of it. Of course the Ten 
Commandments are not arbitrary laws. They are 
largely founded upon the needs of the social or- 
ganism; but whether they have the same foundation 
in the needs of animal life apart from man, apart 
from the world of moral obligation, is another ques- 
tion. The animals are neither moral nor immoral: 
they are unmoral; their needs are all physical. It is 
true that the command against murder is pretty well 
kept by the higher animals. They rarely kill their own 
kind: hawks do not prey upon hawks, nor foxes prey 
upon foxes, nor weasels upon weasels; but lower down 
this does not hold. Trout eat trout, and pickerel eat 
pickerel, and among the insects young spiders eat 
one another, and the female spider eats her mate, 
if she can get him. There is but little, if any, neigh- 
borly love among even the higher animals. They 

256 



THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 

treat one another as rivals, or associate for mutual 
protection. One cow will lick and comb another in 
the most affectionate manner, and the next moment 
savagely gore her. Hate and cruelty for the most 
part rule in the animal world. A few of the higher 
animals are monogamous, but by far the greater 
number of species are polygamous or promiscuous. 
There is no mating or pairing in the great bovine 
tribe, and none among the rodents that I know of, 
or among the bear family, or the cat family, or 
among the seals. When we come to the birds, we find 
mating, and occasional pairing for life, as with the 
ostrich and perhaps the eagle. 

As for the rights of property among the animals, 
I do not see how we can know just how far those 
rights are respected among individuals of the same 
species. We know that bees will rob bees, and that 
ants will rob ants; but whether or not one chip- 
munk or one flying squirrel or one wood mouse will 
plunder the stores of another I do not know. Prob- 
ably not, as the owner of such stores is usually on 
hand to protect them. Moreover, these provident lit- 
tle creatures all lay up stores in the autumn, before 
the season of scarcity sets in, and so have no need to 
plunder one another. In case the stores of one squir- 
rel were destroyed by some means, and it were able 
to dispossess another of its hoard, would it not in 
that case be a survival of the fittest, and so condu- 
cive to the well-being of the race of squirrels? 

257 



TIME AND CHANGE 

I have never known any of our wild birds to steal 
the nesting-material of another bird of the same 
kind, but I have known birds to try to carry off the 
material belonging to other species. 

But usually the rule of might is the rule of right 
among the animals. As to most of the other com- 
mandments, — of coveting, of bearing false wit- 
ness, of honoring the father and the mother, and so 
forth, — how can these apply to the animals or have 
any biological value to them? Parental obedience 
among them is not a very definite thing. There is 
neither obedience nor disobedience, because there 
are no commands. The alarm-cries of the parents 
are quickly understood by the young, and their ac- 
tions imitated in the presence of danger, all of 
which of course has a biological value. 

The instances which Mr. Seton cites of animals 
fleeing to man for protection from their enemies 
prove to my mind only how the greater fear drives 
out the lesser. The hotly pursued animal sees a pos- 
sible cover in a group of men and horses or in an 
unoccupied house, and rushes there to hide. What 
else could the act mean? So a hunted deer or sheep 
will leap from a precipice which, under ordinary 
circumstances, it would avoid. So would a man. 
Fear makes bold in such cases. 

I certainly have found "good in everything," — 
in all natural processes and products, — not the 
" good " of the Sunday-school books, but the good of 

258 



THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 

natural law and order, the good of that system of 
things out of which we came and which is the source 
of our health and strength. It is good that fire 
should burn, even if it consumes your house; it is 
good that force should crush, even if it crushes you; 
it is good that rain should fall, even if it destroys 
your crops or floods your land. Plagues and pesti- 
lences attest the constancy of natural law. They set 
us to cleaning our streets and houses and to readjust- 
ing our relations to outward nature. Only in a live 
universe could disease and death prevail. Death is 
a phase of life, a redistributing of the type. Decay 
is another kind of growth. 

Yes, good in everything, because law in every- 
thing, truth in everything, the sequence of cause and 
effect in everything, and it may all be good to me if 
on the right principles I relate my life to it. I can 
make the heat and the cold serve me, the winds and 
the floods, gravity and all the chemical and dynami- 
cal forces, serve me, if I take hold of them by the 
right handle. The bad in things arises from our 
abuse or misuse of them or from our wrong relations 
to them. A thing is good or bad according as it 
stands related to my constitution. We say the order 
of nature is rational; but is it not because our reason 
is the outcome of that order? Our well-being consists 
in learning it and in adjusting our lives to it. When 
we cross it or seek to contravene it, we are destroyed. 
But Nature in her universal procedures is not ra- 

259 



TIME AND CHANGE 

tional, as I am rational when I weed my garden, 
prune my trees, select my seed or my stock, or arm 
myself with tools or weapons. In such matters I 
take a short cut to that which Nature reaches by a 
slow, roundabout, and wasteful process. How does 
she weed her garden? By the survival of the fittest. 
How does she select her breeding-stock? By the law 
of battle; the strongest rules. Hers, I repeat, is a 
slow and wasteful process. She fertilizes the soil by 
plowing in the crop. She cannot take a short cut. 
She assorts and arranges her goods by the law of the 
winds and the tides. She builds up with one hand 
and pulls down with the other. Man changes the 
conditions to suit the things. Nature changes the 
things to suit the conditions. She adapts the plant 
or the animal to its environment. She does not 
drain her marshes; she fills them up. Hers is the 
larger reason — the reason of the All. Man's reason 
introduces a new method; it cuts across, modifies, 
or abridges the order of Nature. 

I do not see design in Nature in the old teleological 
sense; but I see every thing working to its own pro- 
per end, and that end is foretold in the means. 
Things are not designed; things are begotten. It is as 
if the final plan of a man's house, after he had begun 
to build it, should be determined by the winds and 
the rains and the shape of the ground upon which it 
stands. The eye is begotten by those vibrations in 
the ether called light, the ear by those vibrations in 

260 



THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 

the air called sound, the sense of smell by those 
emanations called odors. There are probably other 
vibrations and emanations that we have no senses 
for because our well-being does not demand them. 
We think it reasonable that a stone should fall 
and that smoke should rise because we have never 
known either of them to do the contrary. We think 
it reasonable that fire should burn and that frost 
should freeze, because this accords with universal 
experience. Thus, there is a large order of facts 
that are reasonable because they are invariable: the 
same effect always follows the same cause. Our 
reason is developed and disciplined by observing 
the order of Nature; and yet human rationality is of 
another order from the rationality of Nature. Man 
learns from Nature how to master and control her. 
He turns her currents into new channels; he spurs 
her in directions of his own. Nature has no economic 
or scientific rationality. She progresses by the 
method of trial and error. Her advance is symbol- 
ized by that of the child learning to walk. She ex- 
periments endlessly. Evolution has worked all 
around the horizon. In feeling her way to man she 
has produced thousands of other forms of life. The 
globe is peopled as it is because the creative energy 
was blind and did not at once find the single straight 
road to man. Had the law of variation worked only 
in one direction, man might have found himself the 
sole occupant of the universe. Behold the varieties 

261 



TIME AND CHANGE 

of trees, of shrubs, of grasses, of birds, of insects, 
because Nature does not work as man does, with 
an eye single to one particular end. She scatters, 
she sows her seed upon the wind, she commits her 
germs to the waves and the floods. Nature is in- 
different to waste, because what goes out of one 
pocket goes into another. She is indifferent to fail- 
ure, because failure on one line means success on 
some other. 

IV 

But I am not preaching much of a gospel, am I? 
Only the gospel of contentment, of appreciation, of 
heeding simple near-by things — a gospel the bur- 
den of which still is love, but love that goes hand in 
hand with understanding. 

There is so much in Nature that is lovely and lov- 
able, and so much that gives us pause. But here it 
is, and here we are, and we must make the most of it. 
If the ways of the Eternal as revealed in his works 
are past finding out, we must still unflinchingly face 
what our reason reveals to us. "Red in tooth and 
claw." Nature does not preach; she enforces, she 
executes. All her answers are yea, yea, or nay, nay. 
Of the virtues and beatitudes of which the gospel of 
Christ makes so much — meekness, forgiveness, self- 
denial, charity, love, holiness — she knows nothing. 
Put yourself in her way, and she crushes you; she 
burns you, freezes you, stings you, bites you, or 
devours you. 

262 



THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 

Yet I would not say that the study of Nature did 
not favor meekness or sobriety or gentleness or for- 
giveness or charity, because the great Nature stud- 
ents and prophets, like Darwin, would rise up and 
confound me. Certainly it favors seriousness, truth- 
fulness, and simplicity of life; or, are only the seri- 
ous and single-minded drawn to the study of Na- 
ture? I doubt very much if it favors devoutness or 
holiness, as those qualities are inculcated by the 
church, or any form of religious enthusiasm. De- 
voutness and holiness come of an attitude toward 
the universe that is in many ways incompatible with 
that implied by the pursuit of natural science. The 
joy of the Nature student like Darwin or any great 
naturalist is to know, to find out the reason of 
things and the meaning of things, to trace the foot- 
steps of the creative energy; while the religious 
devotee is intent only upon losing himself in infinite 
being. True, there have been devout naturalists and 
men of science; but their devoutness did not date 
from their Nature studies, but from their training, 
or from the times in which they lived. Theology 
and science, it must be said, will not mingle much 
better than oil and water, and your devout scientist 
and devout Nature student lives in two separate 
compartments of his being at different times. In- 
tercourse with Nature — I mean intellectual inter- 
course, not merely the emotional intercourse of the 
sailor or explorer or farmer — tends to beget a habit 

263 



TIME AND CHANGE 

of mind the farthest possible removed from the 
myth-making, the vision-seeing, the voice-hearing 
habit and temper. In all matters relating to the vis- 
ible, concrete universe it substitutes broad daylight 
for twilight; it supplants fear with curiosity; it over- 
throws superstition with fact; it blights credulity 
with the frost of skepticism. I say frost of skepti- 
cism advisedly. Skepticism is a much more health- 
ful and robust habit of mind than the limp, pale- 
blooded, non-resisting habit that we call credulity. 
In intercourse with Nature you are dealing with 
things at first hand, and you get a rule, a standard, 
that serves you through life. You are dealing with 
primal sanities, primal honesties, primal attraction; 
you are touching at least the hem of the garment 
with which the infinite is clothed, and virtue goes 
out from it to you. It must be added that you are 
dealing with primal cruelty, primal blindness, pri- 
mal wastefulness, also. Nature works with refer- 
ence to no measure of time, no bounds of space, and 
no limits of material. Her economies are not our 
economies. She is prodigal, she is careless, she is 
indifferent; yet nothing is lost. What she lavishes 
with one hand, she gathers in with the other. She 
is blind, yet she hits the mark because she shoots in 
all directions. Her germs fill the air; the winds and 
the tides are her couriers. When you think you have 
defeated her, your triumph is hers; it is still by her 
laws that you reach your end. 

264 



THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 

We make ready our garden in a season, and plant 
our seeds and hoe our crops by some sort of system. 
Can any one tell how many hundreds of millions of 
years Nature has been making ready her garden and 
planting her seeds? 

There can be little doubt, I think, but that inter- 
course with Nature and a knowledge of her ways 
tends to simplicity of life. We come more and more 
to see through the follies and vanities of the world 
and to appreciate the real values. We load ourselves 
up with so many false burdens, our complex civiliza- 
tion breeds in us so many false or artificial wants, 
that we become separated from the real sources of 
our strength and health as by a gulf. 

For my part, as I grow older I am more and more 
inclined to reduce my baggage, to lop off superflu- 
ities. I become more and more in love with simple 
things and simple folk — a small house, a hut in the 
woods, a tent on the shore. The show and splendor 
of great houses, elaborate furnishings, stately 
halls, oppress me, impose upon me. They fix the 
attention upon false valuesj they set up a false 
standard of beauty; they stand between me and the 
real feeders of character and thought. A man needs 
a good roof over his head winter and summer, and a 
good chimney and a big wood-pile in winter. The 
more open his four walls are, the more fresh air he 
will get, and the longer he will live. 

How the contemplation of Nature as a whole does 
265 



TIME AND CHANGE 

take the conceit out of us ! How we dwindle to mere 
specks and our little lives to the span of a moment 
in the presence of the cosmic bodies and the inter- 
stellar spaces! How we hurry! How we husband 
our time! A year, a month, a day, an hour may 
mean so much to us. Behold the infinite leisure of 
Nature! 

A few trillions or quadrillions of years, what mat- 
ters it to the Eternal? Jupiter and Saturn must be 
billions of years older than the earth. They are evid- 
ently yet passing through that condition of cloud 
and vapor and heat that the earth passed through 
untold aeons ago, and they will not reach the stage 
of life till seons to come. But what matters it? Only 
man hurries. Only the Eternal has infinite time. 
When life comes to Jupiter, the earth will doubtless 
long have been a dead world. It may continue a 
dead world for seons longer before it is melted up in 
the eternal crucible and recast, and set on its career 
of life again. 

Familiarity with the ways of the Eternal as they 
are revealed in the physical universe certainly tends 
to keep a man sane and sober and safeguards him 
against the vagaries and half-truths which our creeds 
and indoor artificial lives tend to breed. Shut away 
from Nature, or only studying her through religious 
fears and superstitions, what a mess a large body of 
mankind in all ages have made of it! Think of the 
obsession of the speedy "end of the world" which 



THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 

has so often taken possession of whole communities, 
as if a world that has been an eternity in forming 
could end in a day, or on the striking of the clock! 
It is not many years since a college professor pub- 
lished a book figuring out, from some old historical 
documents and predictions, just the year in which 
the great mundane show would break up. When I 
was a small boy at school in the early forties, during 
the Millerite excitement about the approaching end 
of all mundane things, I remember, on the day 
when the momentous event was expected to take 
place, how the larger school-girls were thrown into 
a great state of alarm and agitation by a thunder- 
cloud that let down a curtain of rain, blotting out 
the mountain on the opposite side of the valley. 
"There it comes!" they said, and their tears flowed 
copiously. I remember that I did not share their 
fears, but watched the cloud, curious as to what the 
end of the world would be like. I cannot brag, as 
Thoreau did, when he said he would not go around 
the corner to see the world blow up. I am quite sure 
my curiosity would get the better of me and that I 
should go, even at this late day. Or think of the 
more harmless obsession of many good people about 
the second coming of Christ, or about the resurrec- 
tion of the physical body when the last trumpet 
shall sound. A little natural knowledge ought to be 
fatal to all such notions. Natural knowledge shows 
us how transient and insignificant we are, and how 

267 



TIME AND CHANGE 

vast and everlasting the world is, which was seons 
before we were, and will be other aeons after we are 
gone, yea, after the whole race of man is gone. 
Natural knowledge takes the conceit out of us, and 
is the sure antidote to all our petty anthropomorphic 
views of the universe. 



I was struck by this passage in one of the recently 
published letters of Saint-Gaudens : "The principal 
thought in my life is that we are on a planet going 
no one knows where, probably to something higher 
(on the Darwinian principle of evolution); that, 
whatever it is, the passage is terribly sad and tragic, 
and to bear up at times against what seems to be the 
Great Power that is over us, the practice of love, 
charity, and courage are the great things." 

The " Great Power" that is over us does seem un- 
mindful of us as individuals, if it does not seem 
positively against us, as Saint-Gaudens seemed to 
think it was. 

Surely the ways of the Eternal are not as our 
ways. Our standards of prudence, of economy, of 
usefulness, of waste, of delay, of failure — how far 
off they seem from the scale upon which the uni- 
verse is managed or deports itself! If the earth 
should be blown to pieces to-day, and all life in- 
stantly blotted out, would it not be just like what 
we know of the cosmic prodigality and indifference? 

268 



THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 

Such appalling disregard of all human motives and 
ends bewilders us. 

Of all the planets of our system probably only 
two or three are in a condition to sustain life. Mer- 
cury, the youngest of them all, is doubtless a dead 
world, with absolute zero on one side and a furnace 
temperature on the other. But what matters it? 
Whose loss or gain is it? Life seems only an incident 
in the universe, evidently not an end. It appears or it 
does not appear, and who shall say yea or nay? The 
asteroids at one time no doubt formed a planet be- 
tween Mars and Jupiter. Some force which no adjec- 
tive can describe or qualify blew it into fragments, 
and there, in its stead, is this swarm of huge rocks 
making their useless rounds in the light of the sun 
forever and ever. What matters it to the prodigal 
All? Bodies larger than our sun collide in the depths 
of space before our eyes with results so terrific that 
words cannot even hint them. The last of these colli- 
sions — of this "wreck of matter and crush of 
worlds" — reported itself to our planet in Febru- 
ary, 1901, when a star of the twelfth magnitude 
suddenly blazed out as a star of the first magnitude 
and then slowly faded. It was the grand finale of the 
independent existence of two enormous celestial bod- 
ies. They apparently ended in dust that whirled away 
in the vast abyss of siderial space, blown by the 
winds upon which suns and systems drift as autumn 
leaves. It would be quite in keeping with the ob- 

269 



TIME AND CHANGE 

served ways of the Eternal, if these bodies had had 
worlds in their train, teeming with life, which met 
the same fate as the central colliding bodies. 

Does not force as we know it in this world go its 
own way with the same disregard of the precious 
thing we call life? Such long and patient prepara- 
tions for it, — apparently the whole stellar system 
in labor pains to bring it forth, — and yet held so 
cheaply and indifferently in the end! The small in- 
sect that just now alighted in front of my jack-plane 
as I was dressing a timber, and was reduced to a 
faint yellow stain upon the wood, is typical of the 
fate of man before the unregarding and unswerving 
terrestrial and celestial forces. The great wheels 
go round just the same whether they are crushing 
the man or crushing the corn for his bread. It is all 
one to the Eternal. Flood, fire, wind, gravity, are 
for us or against us indifferently. And yet the earth 
is here, garlanded with the seasons and riding in the 
celestial currents like a ship in calm summer seas, 
and man is here with all things under his feet. All 
is well in our corner of the universe. The great mill 
has made meal of our grist and not of the miller. 
We have taken our chances and have won. More 
has been for us than against us. During the little 
segment of time that man has been upon the earth, 
only one great calamity that might be called cosmi- 
cal has befallen it. The ice age of one or two hun- 
dred thousand years was such a calamity. But man 

270 



THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 

survived it. The spring came again, and life, the 
traveler, picked itself up and made a new start. 
But if he had not survived it, if nothing had sur- 
vived it, the great procession would have gone on 
just the same; the gods would have been just as well 
pleased. 

The battle is to the strong, the race is to the fleet. 
This is the order of nature. No matter for the rest, 
for the weak, the slow, the unlucky, so that the fight 
is won, so that the race of man continues. You and I 
may fail and fall before our time; the end may be a 
tragedy or a comedy. What matters it? Only some 
one must succeed, will succeed. 

We are here, I say, because, in the conflict of 
forces, the influences that made for life have been in 
the ascendant. This conflict of forces has been a 
part of the process of our development. We have 
been ground out as between an upper and a nether 
millstone, but we have squeezed through, we have 
actually arrived, and are all the better for the grind- 
ing — all those who have survived. But, alas for 
those whose lives went out in the crush! Maybe 
they often broke the force of the blow for us. 

Nature is not benevolent; Nature is just, gives 
pound for pound, measure for measure, makes no 
exceptions, never tempers her decrees with mercy, 
or winks at any infringement of her laws. And in 
the end is not this best? Could the universe be run 
as a charity or a benevolent institution, or as a poor- 

271 



TIME AND CHANGE 

house of the most approved pattern? Without this 
merciless justice, this irrefragable law, where should 
we have brought up long ago? It is a hard gospel; 
but rocks are hard too, yet they form the founda- 
tions of the hills. 

Man introduces benevolence, mercy, altruism, 
into the world, and he pays the price in his added 
burdens; and he reaps his reward in the vast social 
and civic organizations that were impossible with- 
out these things. 

I have no doubt that the life of man upon this 
planet will end, as all other forms of life will end. 
But the potential man will continue and does con- 
tinue on other spheres. One cannot think of one 
part of the universe as producing man, and no other 
part as capable of it. The universe is all of a piece 
so far as its material constituents are concerned; 
that we know. Can there be any doubt that it is 
all of a piece so far as its invisible and intangible 
forces and capabilities are concerned? Can we be- 
lieve that the earth is an alien and a stranger in the 
universe? that it has no near kin? that there is no 
tie of blood, so to speak, between it and the other 
planets and systems? Are the planets not all of one 
family, sitting around the same central source of 
warmth and life? And is not our system a member 
of a still larger family or tribe, and it of a still larger, 
all bound together by ties of consanguinity? Size 
is nothing, space is nothing. The worlds are only 

272 



THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 

red corpuscles in the arteries of the infinite. If man 
has not yet appeared on the other planets, he will in 
time appear, and when he has disappeared from this 
globe, he will still continue elsewhere. 

I do not say that he is the end and aim of crea- 
tion; it would be logical, I think, to expect a still 
higher form. Man has been man but a little while 
comparatively, less than one hour of the twenty- 
four of the vast geologic day; a few hours more and 
he will be gone; less than another geologic day like 
the past, and no doubt all life from the earth will be 
gone. What then? The game will be played over 
and over again in other worlds, without approach- 
ing any nearer the final end than we are now. There 
is no final end, as there was no absolute beginning, 
and can be none with the infinite. 



THE END 



INDEX 



Adirondack Mountains, 94, 96, 109. 

Agassiz, Louis, disbelief in evolu- 
tion, 1, 157; first conception of the 
continental ice-sheet, 157. 

Aiken, Mr., of the island of Maui, 
attentions received from, 133- 
136. 

Andrews, Judge, of Hilo, Hawaii, 
149. 

Animals, unmorality of, 256-258; 
fleeing to man for protection, 258. 
See also Life. 

Appalachian Mountains, 92, 94. 

Arizona, Bad Lands of, 103. 

Armor, and immobility, 225. 

Astronomy, and biology, 206, 207. 

Bad Lands, Arizona, 103. 

Beginnings, 12. 

Bergson, Henri Louis, his Creative 
Evolution, 202 note; on armored 
organisms, 225; on intelligence 
and instinct, 230. 

Bermuda, American birds in, 254. 

Biological tree, the image mislead- 
ing, 232. 

Biology, its new career under evolu- 
tion, 206, 207; rooted in geology, 
240; not for all men, 250. 

Birds, and reflected images, 252; 
lessons from, 253-256; mating for 
life, 257; stealing nesting-mate- 
rial, 258. 

Bluebird (Sialia sialis), evolution 
of, 201. 

Bluebird (Sialia sp.), in the Yosem- 
ite, 78. 

Bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus) , 
255. 

Boulders, glacier-borne, 163, 164. 

Brain, the, evolution of, 16. 

Canons, Nature's studies in, 44, 45. 

See also Grand Canon. 
Cathedral Rocks, 73. 



Catskills, the, geological structure, 

92, 93; erosion in, 184-186. 
Cell, the, the unit of life, 35. 
Chamberlin, Thomas C, and R. D. 

Salisbury, their Geology, 101. 
Chemistry, of the rocks, 105-108; 

and life, 209-211. 
Chief Mountain, 172. 
Chin, the, man's only exclusive 

member, 31. 
Clover, white, 137. 
Colorado River, erosion in the 

Grand Canon, 61-64. 
Cope, Edward D., 19, 20. 
Country, life in the, 244, 245. 
Craters, Haleakala, 138-143; Ki- 

lauea, 150-155. 
Creation, a continuous process, 188; 

by fiat and by evolution, 203, 

204 ; by chemistry and mechanics, 

211. 
Cuvier, 88. 

Dana, James Dwight, quoted, 10, 
171; 101. 

Darwin, Charles, made the theory 
of evolution alive and real, 206; 
218, 250. 

Dawson, Sir John William, disbe- 
lief in evolution, 1, 2. 

Diamond Head, Oahu, 121, 130, 
131. 

Dinosaurs, 16. 

Dryopithecus, 222. 

Dutton, Maj. Clarence Edward, 
quoted, 51, 60, 61. 

Earth, the, history of, 13-15, 21-23, 
88, 89; ripening of, 23; age of, 85; 
its growth, 86, 87; crust of, 95; 
tranquillity of its history, 111— 
113; changes in the crust of, 114- 
116, 171, 172; vitality of, 187; 
ultimate fate of, 268, 269. See 
also Geology and World. 



275 



INDEX 



Earthquakes, 171, 172. 

El Capitan, 73. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quoted, 97, 
98, 187, 245; a follower of Agas- 
siz, 98. 

Environment, influence of, 214, 215. 

Eohippus, 176. 

Erosion, in the Hawaiian Islands, 
59, 135, 146-148; its part in shap- 
ing the earth's surface, 91 ; slow- 
ness of its work, 182-186. 

Evolution, the long road of, 1-38; 
belief and disbelief in the doctrine, 
1-7; adds greatly to the wonder of 
life, 3; length of time implied by, 
7-11; endless beginning and end- 
less ending, 12; from the simple 
to the complex, 23, 24; concen- 
trates along certain lines, 36; 
hard to get on intimate terms 
with, 177; makes the universe 
alive, 187; the tide at the full, 192, 
193; Walt Whitman as an evolu- 
tionist, 197 ; hindrances to a belief 
in, 198-205; the largest general- 
ization of the modern mind, 205; 
not a godless doctrine, 212; as a 
prestidigitator, 213, 214; makes 
the world over for us, 228; the 
impulse in, 236. 

Faith, scientific, 175-186. 

Fire, here before man, 111. 

First Cause, 217-219. 

Frear, Mary Dillingham, quoted, 

119; 125; a walk with, 128-130. 
Frear, Walter Francis, 125; a walk 

with, 128-130. 

Generalization, in evolution, 230. 

Geologic time, figured under the 
symbol of a year, 21, 22; and 
chronological time, 90, 91; clock 
of, 95; and human history, 97; 
periods of, 116, 117; powers of, 
174; vastness of, 199, 200. 

Geologist, the, his scientific imagina- 
tion, 87; interpreter of the records 
of the rocks, 88; his daring affirm- 
ations,^; deals with big figures, 
97. 

Geology, in the East and in the 



West, 39-45; of the Grand Canon, 
51-55, 57-65, 67-69; of the 
Yosemite, 79-83; the world as 
seen in the light of, 85-117. See 
also Earth, Evolution, and Rocks. 

Geosyncline, 94. 

Gigantic, Nature's experiments with 
the, 16-18, 223. 

Glacial periods, gradual approach 
of the Pleistocene winter, 113, 
114. 

Glaciation, Agassiz's discovery, 
157; southern limit in United 
States, 158, 159; work of the ice- 
sheet, 159, 160; evidence near 
home, 161-163; flowing of the 
ice-sheet, 164, 165. 

Glenwood, Hawaii, 149, 150. 

Goats, wild, 138, 143. 

God, immanent in his universe, 179, 
199. 

"Good in everything," 258, 259. 

Grand Canon, the, first impressions, 
46-49; architectural features and 
suggestions, 49-54; geology, 51- 
55, 57-65, 67-69; cleanness, 55; 
sense of depth of, 56; look of 
ordered strength, 56, 57; descent 
into, 65-70; flowers and a bird- 
song in, 70; contrasted with 
Yosemite, 75-78. 

Granite, the Adam rock, 102, 103; 
dissolution of, 108. 

Guava, 135. 

Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich, 7, 25, 
235. 

Haleakala, a visit to, 133-146. 

Halemaumau, 151. 

Half Dome, 73. 

Hau-tree, 126, 127. 

Hawaii, island of , 143, 148; visit to, 
149-155. 

Hawaiian Islands, erosion in, 59, 
135, 146-148; shape of valleys in, 
81; origin of, 116; a visit to, 119- 
155; lines by Mary Dillingham 
Frear on, 119; approach to, 119- 
121; land shells of, 129, 130; birds 
in, 132, 133, 143, 151; mosquitoes 
in, 136. 

Hawaiian language, 122. 



276 



INDEX 



Hawaiians, diving boys, 122; surf- 
riding, 131. 

Heart, the, origin of, 19. 

Heat, its relation to life, 210, 211. 

Henry Mountains, 173. 

Hetch-Hetchy Valley, 79, 80. 

Hilo, 149, 155. 

Honey-sucker, 151. 

Honolulu, harbor of, 121, 122; first 
impressions of the city, 122, 123; 
population, 123, 124; attractions, 
124; Americans in, 124, 125; the 
skylark at, 132, 133. 

Horn-fly, Texas, 137. 

Horns, in evolution, 237, 238. 

Horse, the, evolution of, 33, 176; 
mankind and, 229. 

Hudson River, mineral matter car- 
ried by, 169; geology of the two 
sides at New York, 173, 174. 

Huxley, Thomas Henry, 218. 

Iao Valley, 134, 146. 

Ice-sheet, continental. See Glacia- 

tion. 
Ichneumon-fly, 251, 252. 
Imagination, the scientific and the 

poetic, 87, 88. 

Japanese, in the Hawaiian Islands, 
134, 136, 149. 

Kahoolawe, 146. 

Kahului, 133. 

Kauai, 147, 148. 

Kilauea, 133; visit to the volcano, 

149-155. 
King's River Valley, 79, 80. 

Laccolites, 172, 173. 

Lahaina, 147, 149. 

Land, a farmer's strong, 158. 

Lantana, 125, 126, 145. 

Lark. See Skylark. 

Laurentian Hills, 109. 

Lava, 151-153, 172, 173. 

Lemurs, 235. 

Liberty Cap, 74, 75. 

Life (biological), dawn of, 5; artifi- 
cial production of, 11, 209, 210; as- 
cending series of, 18-21 ; progress 
from the simple to the complex, 



23, 24; the mystery of its incep- 
tion, 37, 38; geologic periods of, 
116, 117; rises on stepping-stones 
of its dead self, 117; the tide at 
the full, 192, 193; nature of, 207- 
209; dependent on heat and chem- 
ical action, 210, 211; origin of, 
217-219; the tree of, 232; the 
stream of, 233; rankness in early 
biologic times, 238. See also Evo- 
lution. 

Limestone, 108, 110. 

Locomotion, evolution of, 21. 

Logcock. See Woodpecker, north- 
ern pileated. 

London, fossil fruits under, 26. 

Lowell, Mr., superintendent of 
sugar-making plant in Hawaiian 
Islands, 148. 

Lowell, Percival, 193. 

Lyell, Sir Charles, 82, 99-101; 
quoted, 105. 

Malaspina Glacier, 160. 

Mammals, origin of, 19. 

Man, origin of, 1-13, 21, 175-181, 
188-194; larger than his ancestors, 
18; the end of the life series, 22; 
the goal of life's progress, 24, 25; 
his specialization in the brain, 26, 
27; has had the experience of all 
the animals below him, 28, 29; 
loss and gain of organs and pow- 
ers in the course of his develop- 
ment, 30-33; fortuitous variation 
insufficient to account for the 
evolution of, 38; his ancestry, 97, 
98; physical and mental evolu- 
tion of, 189; continuity of his 
descent, 190-192; future evolu- 
tion of, 194-196; seems of another 
sphere than the animals, 202, 
203; creation of, 203-205; varia- 
tion in, 215-217; his evolution 
and the First Cause, 218, 219; 
not a fallen, but a risen, creature, 
219; heir of the geologic ages, 220, 
221; concrete conceptions of his 
descent, 221-223; hazards en- 
countered in the line of his de- 
scent, 225-239; one of the most 
generalized of animals, 230; haz- 



277 



INDEX 



ards of his future, 239-241; and 
altruism, 272; ultimate fate of 
the race, 272, 273; his existence 
on other spheres, 272, 273. 

Mango, 124, 134. 

Maui, 129; a visit to, 133-149; shape 
of, 147. 

Mauna Kea, 148, 155. 

Mauna Loa, 143, 148, 155. 

Merced River, 71, 80. See also 
Yosemite. 

Mercury, the planet, 269. 

Millerite excitement, 267. 

Mina, 132, 143. 

Mind, human and animal, 202. 

Mirror Lake, 73. 

Mississippi River, mineral matter 
carried by, 169. 

Molokai, 121, 148. 

Monophyletic hypothesis, the, 231. 

Monroe, Miss Harriet, 47. 

Montana, an over-thrust in, 172. 

Mosquitoes, in the Hawaiian Is- 
lands, 140. 

Mt. Hillers, 173. 

Mt. Tamalpais, 172. 

Mt. Tantalus, Oahu, 123, 128. 

Mountains, short-lived, 93-96; 
walks in the Hawaiian, 125-130; 
a trip to Haleakala, 133-146; 
robbing the clouds, 147; a trip to 
Kilauea, 149-155. 

Mules, at the Grand Canon, 66, 67. 

Murder, among animals, 256. 

Natural selection. See Selection, 
natural. 

Nature, as an inventor and experi- 
menter, 34, 35; in the tropics, 126; 
vast time taken by the processes 
of, 199; the "gospel" of, 243-273; 
and God, 246; teaches more than 
she preaches, 247; knowledge and 
enjoyment of, 249-251; reason in, 
259-262; progresses by trial and 
error, 261, 262; intercourse with, 
264, 265; largeness of, 266; merci- 
less justice of, 271, 272. 

Nature-study, 249, 250. 

Needles, the, Maui, 129. 

Negro, unchanged physically from 
ancient times, 190. 



Nevada Falls, 74. 
North Dome, 73. 

Oahu, first sight of, 121; seen from 
Haleakala, 143, 144; erosion on, 
147. 

Oaks, a peculiarity in, 78, 79. 

Ohelo berries, 151. 

Osborn, Henry Fairfield, 217, 218, 
230; quoted, 237. 

Over-thrusts, 171, 172. 

Paia, 148. 

Palaeontologist, the, a detective of 

the rocks, 214. 
Palaentology. See Evolution. 
Pali, Hawaiian Islands, 129. 
Palisades, the, 174. 
Palola Valley, a walk up, 125- 

128. 
Papaya, 124. 
Parunuweap Cation, 62. 
Penhallow, Mr., sugar plantation 

of, 134. 
Petrified Forests, the, 43, 44, 76. 
Pheasant, in the Hawaiian Islands, 

137. 
Pineapple, plantation, 144, 145; 

canning-plant, 145. 
Punch Bowl, Oahu, 123. 

Quartz, 108. 

Raven, northern (Corvus corax prin- 
cipalis), 230. 

Religion, on the wane, 195; forms 
change but the sentiment persists, 
246. 

Rice-bird, of the Hawaiian Islands, 
127. 

Robin, western (Planesticus migra- 
torius propinquus), 71, 78. 

Rocks, old and young, 96; gene- 
alogy of the sedimentary, 98-110; 
amount of Archaean, 98-101; 
chemistry in the growth of, 105- 
108; depths of the layers of sedi- 
mentary, 107; soil made from, 
167, 168; robbed by the waters, 
169; formation of the sediment- 
ary, 169, 170; over-thrusts in 
the, 171, 172. 



278 



INDEX 



Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, quoted, 
268. 

Salisbury, R. D. See Chamberlin, 
Thomas C. 

Salisbury, Robert, Marquis of, 214. 

San Francisco, earthquake at, 172. 

Science, challenging belief, 175- 
186; ties us to the earth, 179; dis- 
counts heaven in favor of earth, 
179; enlarges the sphere of our 
love, 181; atrophies man's faith 
but softens his heart, 195; cannot 
give the ultimate explanation, 
220; and theology, 263. 

Sea, the, mother of the rocks, 109; 
illusion of a great blue wall, 130. 

Selection, natural. 216. 

Senses, delicacy of the, 244, 245. 

Sentinel Rock, 75. 

Seton, Ernest Thompson, 256, 258. 

Shells, and armor, 225. 

Shells, Hawaiian, 129, 130. 

Sill, 173, 174. 

Silver sword, a plant in the crater 
of Haleakala, 141. 

Skepticism, 264. 

Skylark, in the Hawaiian Islands, 
132, 133, 137, 138. 

Smell, the sense of, 244. 

Soil, the, history of, 14, 15; born of 
the rocks, 86; our mother, 167; 
its making, 167, 168; cycle of the, 
169, 170. 

Specialization, in evolution, 229. 

Stars, collisions among, 269. 

Sugar-making, in the Hawaiian 
Islands, 148. 

Surf-riding, 131, 132. 



Tantalus, Mt., 123, 128. 
Tennyson, Alfred, quoted, 

"Parnassus," 206. 
Thalessa, 251, 252. 
Theology, and science, 263. 
Three Brothers, 73. 



5; his 



Thrush, Oahu, 127. 

Tiger, sabre-toothed, 229. 

Time. See Geologic time. 

Titanothere, 230, 237. 

Tobacco, its effect on the sense of 

smell, 244. 
Tree-ferns, 150. 
Tropics, nature in the, 126. 
Tuscarora Deep, 120. 

Variation, in animals and man, 215- 

217. 
Vernal Falls, 74. 

Waikiki, surf-riding at, 131, 132. 
Wailuku, 134, 147, 148. 
Walking-club, Honolulu, 125. 
Walks, in the Hawaiian Islands, 

125-130. 
Warbler, yellow red-poll, or yellow 

palm warbler (Dendroica palma- 

rum hypochrysea) , 254, 255; notes 

of, 255. 
Warner, Charles Dudley, quoted, 

47. 
Water, chemical and mechanical 

powers of, 169. 
Waterfall, a reversed, 129. 
Whately, Richard, 194. 
Whitman, Walt, quoted, 79, 197, 

202, 213; and evolution, 197. 
Whitney, Josiah Dwight, 82. 
Woodpecker, northern pileated, or 

logcock (Phlceotomus pileatus 

abieticola), 255, 256. 
World, end of the, 266, 267. 
Wren, canon (Catherpes mexicanus 

conspersus), 70. 

Yosemite, its charms, 71, 72; some 
of its features, 73-75; contrasted 
with the Grand Canon, 75-78; 
oaks in, 78, 79; geology of, 79-83. 

Yosemite Falls, 75, 77, 78. 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



OCT 21 191? 



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